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THE DRIFT TOWARD RELIGION 



THE 

DRIFT TOWARD 

RELIGION 



by 
ALBERT W. PALMI 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



-e^ 
^-f^ 



Copyright 1914 
By LUTHER H. CARY 



Ml 12 1915 

THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 

©CLA393233 



Or 



To my mother on her seventieth birthday 
and to my father in memory of evenings 
when he read aloud many good books 
to his small boy 



PKEFACE 

President Wilson, in an address at the Greek 
Theater at the University of California, once 
said that the trouble with most of us is that 
when we know enough to write one chapter we 
insist on writing a book — filling in the other 
chapters with other men's opinions! 

The author of this book disclaims enough 
originality for even one chapter! The whole 
book is filled with unconscious plagiarism, with 
other men's ideas the sources of which have 
been forgotten, and probably the only original 
thing about it is the order in which the ideas 
are marshalled. It simply represents the effort 
of a young minister to justify religion to the 
thoughtful people of a modern western city. 
It is not an argument so much as it is a con- 
fession of faith — albeit a confession of faith 
not fantastic nor irrational, but made after a 
university education and in the full and glad 
acceptance of the modern point of view. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface vii 

I The Drift Toward Religion .... 1 
Manifold Evidences of the Tendency toward 
Religion — Forces Impelling This Religious 
Reawakening — Our Attitude toward It — 
Practical Mysticism 

II God 19 

Why We Believe in God— How We Think of 
Him — Is God Personal? — An Interpretation 
of Prayer 

III The Bible 31 

Increased Study of the Bible — Its Literary 
Form — The Personality of the Gospels — Pro- 
gressive Inspiration of the Bible — Bible 
Times and Modern Times — Supreme Value 
of the Bible 

IV Jesus 47 

Jesus the Man — The Supreme Teacher and 
the Supreme Example — The Tremendous 
Personal Influence of Jesus — Jesus the 
World's Picture of God — Humanity and the 
Divinity of Christ— The Virgin Birth— The 
Miracles — The Resurrection — The Atonement 
— Essential Christianity 

V Immortality 65 

The Unseen — Brain and Soul — The Instinct 
of Immortality— The Fact of Christ— The 
Moral Integrity of the Universe — Human In- 
completeness — Personality and the Subcon- 
scious — Three Lives — The Judgment, Heaven 
and Hell 



Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

VI Religion in Daily Life 83 

The Mystery of Evil — The Hebrew Solution 
— The Solution of the Christian Scientists — 
How to Regard Moral Evil — Pain and Suf- 
fering — Enduring and Imagining — Suffering 
and Character — The Example of Christ — 
Some Spiritual Ideals for Daily Living — The 
Test of a Life 

VII The Church 101 

The Early Church— The Church of the Mid- 
dle Ages — The Reformation — Modern Prot- 
estant Denominations — The Church of Today 
and Its Task — The Church as a Public Serv- 
ice Corporation — The Church of Today and 
(1) Church Unity, (2) Youth, (3) the Social 
Message and (4) the Lives of Men 



CHAPTER I 
THE DRIFT TOWARD RELIGION 



CHAPTER I 
THE DRIFT TOWARD RELIGION 

LESS than twenty years ago Henry Van 
Dyke gave a course of lectures at Yale on 
"The Gospel for An Age of Doubt." Those 
lectures in printed form were put into my 
hands as an undergraduate at The University 
of California. They contained this striking 
characterization of the age: "The questioning 
spirit of today is severe but not bitter, restless 
but not frivolous; it takes itself very seri- 
ously and applies its methods of criticism, of 
analysis, of dissolution, with a sad courtesy of 
demeanor, to the deepest and most vital 
truths of religion, the being of God, the reality 
of the soul, the possibility of a future life. 
Its coat-of-arms is an interrogation point ram- 
pant, above three bishops dormant, and its 
motto is Query?" 

A little later, in my senior year, I came across 
a poem which seemed to express almost per- 
fectly the spiritual mood in which I lived. It 
was Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach": 

"Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! 
Only, from the long line of spray 
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched sand, 
Listen! you hear the grating roar 

[3] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
At their return, up the high strand, 
Begin and cease, and then again begin, 
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
The eternal note of sadness in. 

"Sophocles long ago 
Heard it on the iEgean, and it brought 
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
Of human misery : we 
Find also in the sound a thought, 
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 

"The sea of faith 

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
But now I only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world. 

"Ah, love, let us be true 
To one another! for the world, which seems 
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
So various, so beautiful, so new, 
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 
And we are here as on a darkling plain 
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night." 

The sentence by Van Dyke and the poem by 
Matthew Arnold sum up the impression of 
religion which largely colored my undergradu- 
ate days. Eeligion was obsolescent, something 
to be apologized for — beautiful in a way but 
destined to early death. 

[4] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

But now the tide has turned; the drift is to- 
ward religion. 

It is so in my own case — personal experi- 
ence during the last ten years has deepened 
and strengthened my own religious attitude to- 
ward life. As I look back at my college days 
I realize that it was a very small cargo of 
religious faith with which I emerged on Com- 
mencement Day. I had thrown overboard the 
miracles, eternal punishment, the scheme of 
salvation, the atonement, and the infallibility 
of the Bible. I wrote to my friend the minister 
of the church at home: "You suggest my going 
into the ministry! Why, I am not even sure 
I am a Christian! I don't believe in the Bible 
or the miracles or the Virgin Birth or much 
of anything else." 

He wrote back to me these wise words 
of counsel: "But you do believe in the Golden 
Eule, the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the 
Mount. Then make these your religion. Try 
to live up to this much of Christianity and put 
the other questions up on a high shelf and 
wait. Maybe some day you will be able to take 
them down and see them in a new light. In 
the mean time you will have enough to do in 
living up to what you can accept. ' ' 

It was admirable advice and it kept me 
from reacting utterly against religion and the 
Church. Then in my senior year came a never- 
to-be-forgotten course in Tennyson and Brown- 
ing out of which I came feeling, "Well, if this 

[5] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

sort of interpretation of life isn't true, it ought 
to be!" Then came William James' essay, 
"The Will to Believe." With this religious 
equipment I graduated from the university. 

In the thirteen years since then my religious 
outlook has grown. Year by year faith has 
deepened and sweetened. One by one I have 
taken down some things from the high shelf, 
reinterpreted them in the light of a larger 
experience in life and added them to my pos- 
sessions. There are still some things up there 
on the shelf — but I am not worrying about them 
any more. They help to make the future seem 
interesting ! 

I am convinced that this experience is no 
merely personal one — it is also in part the expe- 
rience of the age. The drift toward religion 
is on in many departments of life. Who would 
have been rash enough to have prophesied 
twenty years ago, for example, that in mate- 
rialistic Chicago a great political party would 
be born which would spontaneously choose 
as its marching song "Onward, Christian 
Soldiers"? Who could then have foreseen the 
subsequent development of Christian Science 
and the whole New Thought Movement in an- 
swer to spiritual hunger? For, though one 
cannot be blind to the possibility of tragedy 
in Christian Science and the occasional foolish- 
ness in New Thought, an impartial observer 
must recognize that these forms of religious ex- 
pression have made progress not by the 

[6] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

vagaries which attach to them like barnacles 
but by the motive power of their spiritual 
idealism. 

In academic and scientific circles we find the 
drift toward religion in the philosophies of 
Rudolph Eucken and Henri Bergson and in the 
utterances of Sir Oliver Lodge, while in the 
business and commercial world it is evidenced 
in the millions of dollars poured out to erect 
buildings for The Young Men's and Young 
Women's Christian Associations and in the 
growing respect for foreign missionaries. Time 
was when foreign missionary enterprise was 
a mere foolish sentimentality to be tolerated 
but despised, but in these new days even the 
proverbial "man in the street" has awakened 
to the fact that, in view of recent history in 
China and Turkey and Albania, the missionary 
is in reality a statesman and a pioneer of all 
that is best and noblest in civilization. 

This religious quickening is apparent in the 
fiction of today. I do not have time to read 
many novels, but recently I have carefully 
studied three works of fiction which are alto- 
gether inspiring in their religious significance. 
One was "The Fear of Living" by Henry 
Bordeaux. This is the story of a fine, coura- 
geous old woman, strengthened through suffer- 
ing by her religious faith, over against a back- 
ground of selfish pleasure-seeking people who 
are afraid of hardship — paralyzed, as it were, 
by "The Fear of Living." The second novel 

[7] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

was "The Way Home" by Basil King, the 
story of a man who deserted his ideals and 
started out to live in materialism and undis- 
guised selfishness, only to find himself driven 
at last by the logic of life back to the ideals 
which he thought he had parted with forever. 
The third novel was i i The Inside of the Cup, ' ' 
easily the most widely-discussed book of the 
year, a frank and enthusiastic setting forth of 
the newer thought of the day on various reli- 
gious questions. 

But even closer than the novel to the heart 
of any age is the drama, and the religious spirit 
of the modern drama is remarkable. Have you 
heard and comprehended that really great al- 
legory of modern religious life, "The Servant 
in the House ' ' ? And do you realize that it has 
been from every point of view one of the most 
successful plays? Have you heard Forbes- 
Eobertson in "The Passing of the Third Floor 
Back"? Did "The Blue Bird" bring you no 
message from the land of the ideal? Can you 
ever forget that great scene in "The Piper" 
where the Piper himself argues with the lonely 
man, the crucified figure of the wayside shrine, 
and at last surrenders his will to Christ's? 
From the revival of "Everyman" a few years 
ago to "The Wolf of Grubbio," published last 
December, the modern drama is overflowing 
with religion. How wonderfully it all contrasts 
with the hopelessness of the lines of "Dover 
Beach"! 

[8] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

Why? Why this drift toward religion? It is 
altogether possible that we cannot tell. Forces 
are at work which we cannot fully understand 
nor anticipate. 

"We cannot kindle, when we will 
The fires that in the heart reside; 
The spirit bloweth and is still, 
In mystery our souls abide." 

But so far as we can lay hold on the causes of 
this religious reawakening it seems to me we 
must include these three: 

(1) The emergence of the modern point of 
view in religious thought — what is sometimes 
called "the new theology." We suffered fif- 
teen years ago because our religious traditions 
and our scientific instruction were hopelessly 
at war with one another. Religion was so univer- 
sal in the life of the Middle Ages partly be- 
cause then religion and science harmonized — 
went hand in hand. When religion and science 
seemed to disagree it was inevitable that many 
intelligent men should sadly but firmly consign 
religion to the realm of outgrown even though 
quaint and beautiful antiquities. We have all 
met men who advised us to "read the King 
James Version of the Bible simply for its beau- 
tiful English," at the same time implying that 
they had long since passed beyond getting out 
of it anything more vital than a pure English 
style. 

But there are not lacking indications that 

[9] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

we are going to approximate once more the 
condition where scientific and religious thought 
are allies, as science and true religion must ever 
be. For the new theology is primarily a scien- 
tific theology, recording gladly all facts attained 
by scientific investigation. What this modern 
religious thought is — how it finds reinforcement 
in modern science, how it demands no false sur- 
renders from men and women trained in the sci- 
entific spirit — this book seeks to set forth. 

To men and women who dread and fear the 
new theology may I offer the parable of the 
aqueduct and the pipe line ? A city in Italy long 
ago obtained its water, pure and clear, from 
the mountains far away across the plain by 
conveying it in a long aqueduct carried high 
above the surrounding country, part of the way 
on lofty arches. But as the centuries passed 
these arches fell into decay — some of them were 
faultily constructed and earthquakes shook 
them down — and so the aqueduct was broken 
in places and water no longer flowed through it 
to the city. Then in our own day came men with 
modern equipment, who laid a pipe line from 
the city to the mountain springs. The pipe line 
followed the same general direction as the old 
aqueduct and it drew its water from the same 
source, and when at length it was completed 
the water poured through it into the city and 
was distributed, clear and sparkling, in a hun- 
dred fountains. 

For the great majority of college-trained 

[10] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

men and women the traditional theology is a 
broken aqueduct, interesting, picturesque, not 
altogether unloved, but broken at certain vital 
points and therefore no longer capable of bring- 
ing water into the modern world to quench its 
spiritual thirst. If we had to choose between 
the traditional theology of our childhood and 
agnosticism, we should sadly but of necessity 
become agnostics. But no such sad necessity is 
upon us. God fulfills himself in various ways 
and the new theology is the inevitable accom- 
paniment of the new science and the new learn- 
ing. By it men are simply seeking along more 
modern lines to tap the great mountain 
reservoirs of spiritual truth and bring to the 
thirsty fountains of our spiritual city the same 
water of eternal life and inspiration which in 
other days flowed in the aqueduct. 

(2) A second force setting in motion this 
drift toward religion is undoubtedly the modern 
emphasis upon the social message of Chris- 
tianity. Books like Peabody's "Social Message 
of Jesus" and Rauschenbusch's "Christianity 
and the Social Crisis," to mention only two 
where many could be cited, are in part results 
and in part causes of this awakening of social 
religion. 

This social emphasis has given to religion 
what it sorely needed — a larger and more ade- 
quate conception of salvation. The old salva- 
tion which we were told about in Sunday school 
and to which the revivalists invited us was a 

[11] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

narrow and selfish thing. But here comes the 
great vision of social salvation — nothing petty 
or selfish about it — calling for all of a man's 
reserves of power and consecration to bring 
it even partially to pass in the community of 
which he is a citizen. The man who goes forth 
to meet the gigantic social problems of city life 
— or of country life either, for that matter — 
soon comes to realize his need of every possible 
reinforcement both for the cause he would ad- 
vance and for his own personal renewal. Hence 
the rediscovery of religion as a social force and 
a secret of personal power and inspiration. It 
is no accident that by far the most popular and 
successful department of The Men and Religion 
Movement was that of social service, that So- 
cialism is becoming distinctly more religious, 
that such a magazine as "The Survey" is edited 
by religious people in a spirit sympathetic to- 
ward the church and that the Y. M. C. A. was 
chosen by the government to care for its wel- 
fare work for employees in the Canal Zone. The 
very size and menace of certain social prob- 
lems, the high-minded courageous service they 
require, the challenge they present to idealism 
and to faith, all combine to drive men and 
women who are socially minded back to some 
vital religious life. To set forth what such 
a socially-sensitive and not merely individualis- 
tic religion might be is one of the objects of 
this book. 

(3) The third and deepest cause of this mod- 

[12] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

ern drift toward religion is the unquenchable 
nature of the religious instinct. The philos- 
ophy of Bergson has given us a new respect 
for instincts: they have cosmic significance; 
they reveal the presence of mighty forces. You 
may lose yourself for a while in the solution of 
physical problems — in digging deep and build- 
ing high — you may even lose yourself in the 
material luxuries which come as a reward for 
the solving of such physical problems, but ul- 
timately you will come back again to the haunt- 
ing questions of religion. 

"When the mind is mapped as streets are — row on row; 
When the heart is tamed from Love's unreasoning throe; 
When the poet's winged fancy- 
Is an outgrown necromancy; 
When the rain of inspiration turns to snow: 
What then? 

"When all doubts and fears alike are backward cast; 
When the dream of world-wide Brotherhood is past; 
When the prophet's radiant vision 
Is too futile for derision ; 
When the soul is but a formula at last: 
What then? 

"When the fierce machine has conquered flesh and blood; 
When the labor-power is belt and wheel and rod; 
When the unfit nations wonder 
At the gold we stagger under; 
When the world is but an economic clod: 
What then?" 

It is a part of the object of this book to jus- 
tify this religious instinct and to make it easier 

[13] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

for thoughtful men and women to respond to 
it and guide it instead of striving vainly to 
quench or disown it. 

Since the drift toward religion is on — what 
then? How shall we respond to this tendency 
of our age? 

Well, first of all, let us rejoice in it. Let 
us cease to be apologetic for religion or the 
Church. The " go-to-church Sunday" which 
has recently become so popular is an indication 
of a better attitude on the part of the general 
public. Eeligion is a part of life — historically 
and psychologically. Let that man be ashamed 
and apologetic who does not share in this great 
human experience! 

In the second place, let us be tolerant. It 
would be a sad thing if the drift toward religion 
meant any drift back into the odium tlieologi- 
cum, into the denominational warfare and 
theological strife which have disgraced the 
past. Let us give to every man the utmost 
freedom of thought and expression in his reli- 
gious life. After all, the real gulf is not be- 
tween those who hold one religious belief and 
those who defend another — between those who 
believe in the Virgin Birth and those who do 
not, between those who hold to the Apostolic 
Succession and those who do not. Such differ- 
ences as these are mere surface grooves when 
compared to the real gulf which exists between 
all those who seek to live the life of the spirit 
and those who regard life with a brutal selfish- 

[14] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

ness and a cynical disregard for all ideals. Some 
one has said of foreign missions: "It is hard 
to discuss forms of baptism in the presence of 
a man engaged in worshipping a cow. ' ' Let us 
not waste energy in unbrotherly controversy in 
the face of the cynical materialism which is a 
foe to all religion and all ideals. 

Finally, let us be open-minded in this glad 
new day of religious quickening. It is alto- 
gether probable that new light is already break- 
ing across the hills. Let us be ready to receive 
it. From Socialism, from Christian Science, 
from psychology, from modern thinkers like 
Tolstoy, Ibsen and Maeterlinck, from the fem- 
inist movement, from the life of Japan and the 
thought of India — from all the word of God 
in all places of his creation who shall say what 
new light may not break forth for us! Let 
us not be either credulous like children or hide- 
bound like bigots, but let us be open-minded, 
ready to find profitable every writing inspired 
of God. 

A new type of religious leader is about to 
stand forth. I like to call him the practical 
mystic. 

Each age has produced that type of religious 
life best suited to its needs: the first century 
stands revealed in St. Paul the missionary, the 
centuries following contribute the martyrs to 
our wealth of Christian heroism, the Middle 
Ages make their gift in crusaders like St. 
Louis and in St. Francis, the little poor man 

[15] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

of Assisi, who sang to the sun and the birds 
and ministered to the poor and the outcast. 
Out of the awakening of the Eenaissance come 
the great reformers — Wyclif, Huss, Savonarola 
and Luther — and out of the reconstruction 
period come the theologians from Calvin and 
Grotius to Jonathan Edwards and Horace 
Bushnell. The nineteenth century as its pecu- 
liar gift brings the evangelists — Finney, Moody, 
Drummond. 

And now comes the new day in which we 
live — a day of social reconstruction and spir- 
itual quickening. The typical Christian of 
this new day will be the practical mystic. He 
will be a mystic — sensitive to the spiritual 
values of life and its deepest music — but he 
will be also a man of practical power — facing 
the social problems of the age and contributing 
to their solution. He will be like Moses, who 
i ' endured as seeing Him that is invisible. ' ' The 
vision is essential to the endurance! Behind 
Moses the deliverer forever stands Moses the 
poet, finding the desert bush aflame with God, 
and behind Moses the lawgiver and civic organ- 
izer stands Moses the mystic, coming down 
from Sinai with the divine light shining on his 
face. 

The meaning of the drift toward religion is 
that the practical men of our age are feeling 
out, oftentimes blindly, for the power of mys- 
ticism. The meaning of the new emphasis on 
social Christianity is that the mysticism of to- 

[16] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

day is ready to link itself to the great practical 
tasks of life. Men like Dr. Grenfell and Pro- 
fessor Rauschenbush, to go no farther, admi- 
rably illustrate what I mean by the term 
' ' practical mystic. ' ' 

This book is written primarily to help prac- 
tical people to be mystics also and to gain from 
religion, vision, comfort, and reserve power. 



[17] 



CHAPTER II 
GOD 



CHAPTER II 
GOD 

"A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot! 
Rose plot, 
Fringed pool, 
Fern'd grot — 
The veriest school 
Of Peace; and yet the fool 
Contends that God is not — 
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool? 
Nay, but I have a sign; 
? Tis very sure God walks in mine." 

I CANNOT hope to persuade you of the exist- 
ence of God if you have not already some- 
times found him walking in the garden of your 
life. But if you have found him there, the fol- 
lowing considerations may help to clarify your 
vision of him and make your faith more uni- 
form and constant. 

Doubtless most of us believe in God a great 
deal more than we realize. The trouble is that 
we do not carry our belief up into the higher 
levels; we stop short of the goal. We believe 
quite readily in the Power which controls and 
unifies physical forces — the God, if you please, 
of chemistry and physics — but we often fail 
to recognize the no less inevitable Power be- 
hind consciousness, behind artistic and moral 

[21] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

impulses — the God of personality ! As a matter 
of fact, I believe we are on the verge of a great 
awakening to the presence of God. The old 
conception of God as an anthropomorphic being 
who made the world as a watchmaker might 
make a watch, and then sat outside of it seeing 
the wheels go round and breaking in upon the 
machinery only occasionally to work a miracle — 
to clean a pivot or adjust a spring — this 
conception of an absentee deity who can 
be conducted to the edge of the universe and 
politely bowed out has passed away for most 
modern men. With this passing there has also 
passed, in too many cases, any potent faith in 
any God at all. 

But there are not lacking signs that this tran- 
sition period during which we have been 

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born," 

to use the sad, reluctant words of Matthew 
Arnold in ' ' The Grande Chartreuse, ' ' has prac- 
tically ended. The new era is already born, and 
humanity is about to rediscover God, to find 
him close at hand calling to its deepest nature, 
even as long ago in the garden Mary heard 
the voice that called her by her name. For 
the God of today is not some huge artificer who 
built the world from without; he is rather the 
great Soul of the Universe who is ever creat- 
ing and recreating it from within. You do 
not demonstrate his existence by appeals to a 

[22] 



God 

supernatural book coming down from antiquity, 
though that book may be part of the evidence, 
nor by a record of miracles worked long ago 
on the shores of other seas, though those 
miracles, too, may be very interesting bits of 
evidence. But you find this God of today here 
in the world around you. Your primary 
evidence is not centuries old; it is new every 
hour. The greatest miracles have never been 
written; they are here in the blossoming of 
the rose and the yet more marvellous blossom- 
ing of childhood and youth. Miracles? The 
world is full of them and every common bush 
is aflame with God! If you do not see and 
stand in awe at the miracles going on all 
around you, what you think about the miracles 
of the Bible is a comparatively insignificant 
detail. 

Let us look out into the universe in which 
we live and see what we find. In the first place, 
wherever we go we find ourselves in the pres- 
ence of stupendous energy and power. Even 
so-called dead matter proves to be very much 
alive, permeated by mighty forces which we 
call gravitation. If I let loose the pencil in 
my hand it promptly drops to the floor, 
demonstrating a marvellous invisible con- 
nection between it and the total mass of the 
earth. 

This "infinite and eternal energy" in the 
presence of which we live is fortunately for us 
no lawless, undependable affair. It works along 

[23] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

certain definite lines and we can depend upon 
its habits. It seems to act in a rational way 
and as far as we can push our scientific inves- 
tigations into it we bring back formulas and 
reports of rational procedure. Apparently 
this universe is made up not of mere happy-go- 
lucky, aimless energy, but of energy which 
operates along lines laid down by intelligence. 
How large the supply of this intelligence is we 
have no way of knowing, but it seems to be 
sufficient to provide endless material for all the 
scientific investigators of the world. No man 
can look out at the vast spectacle of ordered 
life as reported in astronomy and geology, in 
chemistry, botany and zoology, in the habits 
of the bees and the instincts of the animals, and 
not pause reverently in the presence not of 
mere wayward power and occasional gleams 
of rationality, but in the presence of a great, 
unifying Intelligent Energy. That Intelligent 
Energy is God! As a matter of fact we all 
believe in God thus far and base our daily lives 
upon the fact of such a wise, dependable and 
unifying power at the heart of the universe. 

"There is no unbelief: 
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod 
And waits to see it push away the clod — 

He trusts in God." 

But we have not exhausted all we know 
about the universe in which we live. The story 
of evolution claims our attention and suggests 

[24] 



God 

a great purpose, a certain dramatic quality, in 
the creation. This marvellous Intelligent En- 
ergy seems to be going somewhere. Only think, 

"Out of this nothingness arose our thought! 
This blank abysmal nought 

Woke and brought forth that lighted city street; 
Those towers, that armored fleet !" 

The religious implications of evolution are 
tremendous. Instead of making God unneces- 
sary it simply means that we have discovered 
him at work! All our scientific investigation, 
which once seemed to put God farther and 
farther away, now turns out to have been really 
bringing him closer to us. We can hear the 
very ringing music of his craftsmanship and 
catch hints of the perfect craft and tricks of the 
tools } true play. 

"We seem to hear a heavenly friend 
And through thick veils to apprehend 
A labor working to an end." 

But our knowledge of the Intelligent Energy, 
in the presence of which we are ever found and 
from which there is no escape, is not limited 
by what science has to tell us of natural law or 
of evolution. Man, too, is a part of the universe 
and we have a right to judge this Power whose 
activities are all about us by its highest as well 
as its lower manifestations. Wherever we find 
man we find a sense of right and wrong and 
an obligation to do right. Kant said that there 

[25] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

were two things which filled his soul with awe : 
the spectacle of the starry heavens above and 
the moral law within the heart of man. Men 
may not agree as to what is right and what 
is wrong, but the sense of moral obligation is 
universal. With the capacity for morality 
there develops an appreciation of beauty. The 
earliest specimens of human craftsmanship 
which we possess have ornamentation on them, 
and the last boatload of babies from the land 
of the unborn children will soon be gathering 
buttercups and daisies with joyous apprecia- 
tion. With morality and beauty goes love, the 
third great human quality. It may have come 
to us as Drummond and John Fiske suggest — 
along the road of the lengthening period of in- 
fancy and the increasing and appealing help- 
lessness of human childhood, so that only those 
races survived that learned to protect mothers 
and love and care for children. But, however 
it came, love is here as one of the great radiant 
facts of human life. 

Now these human characteristics are not 
merely human characteristics. We have the 
right to project them back into that mighty 
Energy which thrills through the universe and 
of which man is the noblest and highest mani- 
festation. Is God personal? Assuredly he can- 
not be less than personal, for he cannot be less 
than that which reveals his presence and mani- 
fests his character. An Intelligent Power, 
characterized by a progressive purpose and a 

[26] 



God 

sense of morality, beauty and love comes pretty 
near to being a definition of personality ! 

But we must be careful not to limit God's 
personality by our own. We cannot measure 
the ocean in a tin dipper! God's personality 
must be all that ours is — and then vastly more. 
As Herbert Spencer once said, "It is not a 
question between a personal God and something 
less, but between a personal God and something 
more!" Properly interpreted, that is pro- 
foundly true. 

After all, it is not difficult to see that God's 
personality must include all that personality 
means to us and then more, for we see grada- 
tions of personality every day in the world 
around us. Here is a tree: we played under 
it in childhood; we loved it with an instinctive 
revival of primitive nature worship; we can 
close our eyes today and see the red berries 
and smell the fragrance of that old tree — it 
has an individuality all its own. But here is 
a dog. In him personality has reached a higher 
level — we have much more in common with him 
than with the tree. Not long ago a friend and 
I climbed Mount St. Helena. The friendly col- 
lie at the toll house accompanied us with eager 
enthusiasm. The freshness of the morning 
and the joy of muscular exertion were com- 
mon sources of delight to him and to us. At 
the summit we drank some water from the can- 
teen. That action appealed to him, too, as he 
lolled out his long red tongue, panting fever- 

[27] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

ishly and appealing to us with his big brown 
eyes. I laid my hat on the rocks, made a dent 
in the top of it to hold some water and he 
drank with hearty appreciation. So far our per- 
sonalities had traveled similar roads. But now 
we read the tablet on the mountain top telling 
how it had first been climbed by a Eussian 
party from Fort Eoss in 1841. The dog was not 
interested. "We spread a map on the ground, 
and he did not even pause to wonder what the 
little black lines meant. "We pointed to the 
great white cone of Shasta, clearly visible 
nearly two hundred miles away, but Shasta 
meant nothing to him. Our human personali- 
ties had passed out into regions where his dog 
life could never go. 

Even so I believe God is personal, not merely 
in the limited way in which we are, but in 
depths of being and richness of apprehension 
of reality which are simply beyond the depths 
of our human understanding. May not the 
great value of the doctrine of the Trinity be 
just here — that it emphasizes the richness and 
depth and superhuman quality of the person- 
ality of God? 

I like to think of our relationship to God as 
being not like the relation of a completed statue 
to the sculptor who has made it, but more in- 
timate, like the relation of the leaves to the 
tree. No leaf thinks for a moment that it is 
the tree, but each leaf gathers sunshine for the 
tree and receives from all the rest of the tree 

[28] 



God 

the vital forces which give it life. Or, better 
still, I like to think of our lives as being related 
to God somewhat as the great bay out yonder 
is related to the ocean beyond. The bay is not 
the ocean. It knows its shallows and its limi- 
tations. The bay is forever distinct. There 
is no possible confusion between San Francisco 
Bay, for example, and Puget Sound or San 
Diego Bay. Yet bay and ocean are vitally con- 
nected: the same water fills them both and 
twice in every twenty-four hours the bay sends 
its ebb tides far out to sea and again twice in 
every twenty-four hours the great flood tides 
from the ocean crowd in and fill the bay to 
every nook and cranny, lifting it to higher 
levels. 

How such a conception of our relationship 
to God transforms our conception of prayer! 
Prayer becomes no mere formula of words cast 
into the air to find wings and arise to heaven. 
If you have grace to receive it, God does not 
hear prayer — he feels it ! The yearnings of our 
souls reach directly into the life of God. The 
connection between our lives and his is as real 
and immediate as that between two wireless sta- 
tions tuned to receive each other's messages. 
The directions in which we protect our lives, 
the ways we put forth our energies, the work 
we do, the ends we seek with a whole soul's 
tasking — these are our real prayers. If they 
agree with our spoken prayers, well and good. 
But if they disagree with the prayers we utter 

[29] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

with our lips in church on Sunday morning — 
why, then we must only grieve the heart of God. 
But I must guard this. Some one will say: 
"Then you don't believe in verbal prayer l" 
Indeed I do! What makes a patriot? Singing 
"America" or contributing a clean, honest 
life and sharing in all civic work? And yet 
we believe true citizens will want to sing 
i ' America. ' ' What makes a good mother ? The 
kissing and fondling of her baby or ceaseless, 
watchful care for its physical growth and moral 
development? And yet we believe no mother 
can help caressing her child. Here is an artist. 
Essentially he is made an artist by his per- 
ception of beauty. But because he is an artist 
he will try to interpret into color or poetry or 
music the sunset that thrills him with its 
beauty. So prayer in its deepest meaning is 
invisible and inaudible — a motion of the spirit — 
but prayer also demands expression in your 
own words, in the classic English of "The Book 
of Common Prayer," in the beautiful "Vaili- 
ma Prayers" of Eobert Louis Stevenson or 
in those virile, warm-hearted, contemporary 
' ' Prayers of the Social Awakening, ' ' by Walter 
Rauschenbusch. 



[30] 



CHAPTER III 
THE BIBLE 



CHAPTER III 
THE BIBLE 

WE live in a world of things made new. 
We have a new medicine, transformed 
by the discovery of anesthetics and antiseptic 
surgery, of antitoxin for diphtheria and of 
the elimination of the mosquito-spread 
malaria and yellow fever. We live in a 
world of new building construction, rein- 
forced concrete and steel frames replacing 
the old stone walls. Our day is the day of a 
new biology with its emphasis upon evolution 
as the master key to all sorts of problems ; of 
the new psychology with its discovery of the 
powers of suggestion and mental health ; and — 
let us hope — of a new penology, replacing with 
its reform and moral regeneration the crude 
vengeance meted out to criminals for hundreds 
of generations. 

The great spirit of scientific investigation 
and mental alertness to which we owe this re- 
interpretation of so many departments of life 
has not neglected the Bible. More lives of 
Christ have been written in the last forty years 
than in all the Christian centuries before. Such 
books as Hastings' "Bible Dictionary," the 
"Encyclopaedia Biblica," "The Dictionary of 

[33] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

Christ and the Gospels," the Schaff-Herzog 
"Encyclopaedia^ of Eeligious Knowledge," 
"The International Critical Commentary" and 
"The Expositor's Bible" — both in many 
volumes — and works like Schurer's "Jewish 
People in the Time of Christ," Kent's "Stu- 
dents' Old Testament," the volumes of "The 
International Theological Library," Moffat's 
"New Testament," together with innumerable 
single volumes, bear witness to the vast amount 
of scholarly study of the Bible in Germany, 
Great Britain and the United States. 

The result is that we have a new and better 
Bible. Many ideas that prejudiced men against 
the Bible, that clouded its interpretation and 
dishonored the God revealed to us by Jesus 
have passed away forever. 

What is the Bible? Well— first of all— what- 
ever else it may be, it is a great literature — the 
sifted and chosen literature of the Hebrew peo- 
ple. It represents those books which had suffi- 
cient vitality to live down through the centuries. 
In some way they so ministered to the needs 
of humanity that men would not let them die. 

The Bible is not a book. It comes nearer 
to being a library. If you were to take Green's 
"History of England," "Pilgrim's Progress," 
the "Idylls of the King," a hymn-book, the 
Constitution and the common law, Phillips 
Brooks' sermons, "Poor Eichard's Almanac," 
the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, "Richard 
Carvel," the life of Abraham Lincoln, Bacon's 

[34] 



The Bible 

"Essays," "Paradise Lost" and Shakespeare's 
plays and bind them all in one volume, you 
would have in English literature something that 
would be comparable in scope and variety to 
the Bible. Only you would have to print these 
books solidly — without sentence, paragraph or 
chapter divisions. You would have to print 
the poetry as prose and the plays without any 
indications of scenes or speakers. Then have 
this solid mass chopped up into chapters and 
verses — not very intelligently but often cutting 
right across the middle of a poem or interrupt- 
ing the development of an idea. Then bind the 
book in limp black leather, put it on the center 
table where it can be easily dusted and educate 
people to believe that it is all Bible, all prose, 
all to be taken literally, all of equal authority 
as the infallible word of God — the drollery of 
one of Shakespeare's fools to be taken just as 
seriously as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address — 
and you have for English literature something 
equivalent in form, matter and meaning to what 
our Bibles are in relation to the literature of 
the Hebrews. 

As a matter of fact we have in the Bible 
many different literary forms. The Books of 
Samuel and Kings and the Book of Acts rep- 
resent history; the early chapters of Genesis 
represent early traditions not dissimilar in 
quality to the stories of King Arthur; bits of 
allegory are scattered through the Old and New 
Testament; the Book of Psalms is the liynin- 

[35] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

book of the Second Temple ; Deuteronomy and 
Leviticus represent the common law; Amos, 
Isaiah and the other prophets present one of 
the world's greatest collections of sermons and 
orations; the Book of Proverbs represents the 
practical wisdom of the Hebrew race; Ec- 
clesiastes sometimes parallels the Rubaiyat in 
pessimism; Esther and Daniel probably partake 
of the character of historical romances not dis- 
similar to "Richard Carvel"; we have a col- 
lection of letters in the Epistles of St. Paul, and 
an approach to dramatic literature in the Book 
of Job, while the four most precious biographies 
in the world are the Gospels. 

Why do I emphasize the fact that the Bible 
is literature? First: Because an appreciation 
of this fact helps us really to understand the 
different books. We read poetry in one mood, 
history in another, drama in yet another, and 
the common law in quite another. When you 
approach the Bible it is worth while to ask 
yourself: "What form of literature am I read- 
ing ?" When, for example, you read in your 
English history that on a certain day in 1066 
William the Conqueror landed on the English 
coast you take the matter seriously and as a 
statement of prosaic fact, but what would you 
think of a man who, reading "Gareth and 
Lynette," came to these lines: 

"Seeing the city is built 
To music, therefore never built at all, 
And therefore built forever" 

[36] 



The Bible 

and said: "That's stuff and nonsense! Cities 
aren't built to music. They are built to blue- 
prints, bond issues and the demands of com- 
merce." You would simply say to him: "Why, 
you don't understand what you are reading. 
This is poetry and the city is a symbol of the 
ideal." Yet, we have in the past constantly 
done violence to our Bibles by failing to recog- 
nize the different types of literature they 
contain. 

A prosaic race, quite failing to understand 
the poetic Oriental temperament, has exhausted 
its wits to explain how Joshua could have 
stopped the earth from revolving on its axis, 
utterly missing the poetry in which the incident 
is narrated. And yet, are we entirely lacking 
in poetry? Do we not sing in our national 
anthem : 

"Let mortal tongues awake, 
Let all that breathe partake, 
Let rocks their silence break, 
The sound prolong"? 

Should we not be slightly amazed to wake up 
two thousand years from now to find people 
solemnly claiming that rocks in our day were 
possessed of human speech when in the lines 
in question we were only trying to make a 
poetical reference to the echo? 

"This is the tragedy of the Book of Jonah," 
says George Adam Smith, "that a book which 
is made the means of one of the most sublime 
revelations of truth in the Old Testament 

[37] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

should be known to most only for its connec- 
tion with the whale." Why? Because to most 
people it has never been revealed that the Book 
of Jonah is an allegory, that the important 
thing is not the story it tells, but the message 
it carries. If this were once clearly understood, 
the whale would cease to worry us, and we 
should give our attention to the great message 
of human brotherhood and to the brooding, 
tender love of God for the great heathen city 
of Nineveh with its 120,000 little children too 
small to know their right hand from their left 
' ' and also much cattle. ' ' 

You have an entirely parallel situation in 
"Pilgrim's Progress.' ' I remember noticing 
when a boy that in the pictures of Christian 
he had no armor on his back and I criticized 
his inadequate equipment to my father, who 
w v as reading the story to me. It was explained 
that this was symbolical of the fact that a Chris- 
tian is safe only when facing his foes and not 
when running away from them. But what 
would you think of a man who would say: "I 
don't believe in that book they call ' Pilgrim's 
Progress'? I went to Europe last summer and 
saw hundreds of suits of armor. Every one of 
them went all the way around. I don't believe 
any man ever went out to fight in a suit of 
armor that didn't protect his back." You 
would simply laugh at him and say he had 
missed the point of the allegory. But if a man 
suggests that he has doubts as to whether or 

[38] 



The Bible 

not Jonah was really swallowed by a great fish, 
you hold a heresy trial to determine whether or 
not he is a Christian. 

It is worth while also to emphasize the liter- 
ary character of the Bible because it brings 
into the Bible so much of variety and therefore 
of interest. If you have sixty-six different 
friends, you value them because of their dis- 
tinct individualities. You admire this man 
for courage, and that one for his dogged 
determination. You honor this woman for 
her fine serenity of spirit and that one for her 
capacity to forgive injury. This friend min- 
isters to your life by his love of poetry and 
this other one by his irrepressible sense of 
humor. How terrible it would be to have sixty- 
six friends all alike — have them answer your 
questions in the same words and greet your 
story with the same identical smile! "When 
we understand the literary nature of the 
Bible its sixty-six different books become so 
many different friends ministering to us, each 
with its own message and fitted to meet differ- 
ent moods and times. 

To illustrate this let me outline to you some- 
thing of the personality of the four Gospels. 
The first one to be written was Mark. Mark was 
Peter's secretary at Rome. After Peter had 
given his life in martyrdom at the Circus 
Maximus the litle group of Christian believers, 
fearful lest what he had said of the Lord should 
be lost, persuaded Mark to write down what 

[39] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

he remembered of Peter's teachings about 
Jesus' life. The result is the kind of book one 
would expect to come out of such circumstances. 
Behind it is Peter — impulsive, alert, a man of 
action. It is addressed to the Eoman people, 
the road-builders, the law-makers of antiquity, 
people who demanded results, who were in- 
terested in action. Mark's Gospel, therefore, 
contains very little discourse material, but it 
tells a great deal about what Jesus actually 
did. In its descriptions of his activities it is 
the most circumstantial and vivid of the four. 
It is Peter's Gospel, written for the Romans 
and portraying Jesus as the Master of Men, 
the Doer of Mighty Deeds. 

The second Gospel to be written was Mat- 
thew. Our present Matthew is a combination 
of almost all of the narrative material of Mark 
together with a mass of discourse material 
which probably originally circulated indepen- 
dently and was known as the logia of Matthew. 
This Gospel was written in Palestine by a Jew 
and for the Jews. Its great theme is the King- 
dom of Heaven. It gives The Sermon on the 
Mount as the inaugural address of that Kingdom. 
It is constantly appealing to the Jewish scrip- 
tures : "Thus it is written through the prophet' ' 
is a constantly recurring formula. Its great 
purpose is to set forth to Jewish readers Jesus 
as a fulfillment of prophecy and as the Mes- 
sianic King. 

Luke's Gospel, while containing much mate- 

[40] 



The Bible 

rial in common with Mark and Matthew, has 
an independent character of its own. It is writ- 
ten in the best Greek of the four. It abounds 
in medical terms. Its author was probably a 
Greek physician, a companion of St. Paul. Its 
dominant quality is its humanitarianism. It 
dwells with especial tenderness on Jesus' kind- 
ness to children and women and all other neg- 
lected and outcast classes of the day. It is a 
social gospel, and its denunciations of wealth 
are by no means mild. It alone of the four 
Gospels has preserved to us the parable of the 
Prodigal Son, the parable of the Good Samari- 
tan and the story of Zacchaeus. It portrays 
not Jesus the Doer of Mighty Deeds nor 
Jesus the Messianic King, but it reveals 
with surpassing tenderness Jesus the Great 
Physician. 

These three Gospels are photographic in 
their character. They represent Jesus as 
caught upon the sensitive plate of three differ- 
ent types of mind. In the fourth Gospel we 
have something more nearly akin to a painted 
portrait, possibly less accurate in some details 
and yet for that very reason having a pro- 
founder insight into the deeper truths of char- 
acter. I have read somewhere of a portrait 
artist before whom some men found it unwise 
to sit because unconsciously the artist painted 
not only the external apearance but also the 
inner soul of his subject. John's Gospel is such 
a great artistic interpretation of the soul of 

[41] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

Jesus. It was probably written in Ephesus by 
a group of disciples of John who looked to 
him as their authority and therefore bears a 
relation to John similar to that which the Gos- 
pel of Mark bears to Peter. It is an attempt to 
interpret the fact of Christ into the terms of the 
prevalent mystical philosophy of the day. It 
sets forth Jesus the Son of God. It is the pro- 
foundly religious Gospel which appeals to us 
at our moments of highest exaltation and deep- 
est need. "Let not your heart be troubled; 
ye believe in God, believe also in me." "In the 
world ye shall have tribulation. Be of good 
cheer, I have overcome the world. ? ' " And the 
word became flesh and dwelt among us full 
of grace and truth and we all beheld his 
glory, glory as of the only begotten from the 
Father." 

I have said that the Bible is a great litera- 
ture, but I cannot stop here. The Bible is not 
only a great literature — it is the great litera- 
ture of the spirit. It lives and endures not for 
its sheer literary power, though that is often 
exquisite, but because of its spiritual mes- 
sage. God seems to have given to the Greeks 
a genius for perception of artistic form, to the 
Eomans a genius for organization, to the Anglo- 
Saxons for self-government, to the modern Ger- 
mans for the application of science to problems 
of community life, and to the ancient Hebrews a 
genius for religion. Here in the Bible are the 
greatest answers the world has ever heard to 

[42] 



The Bible 

those irrepressible questions of every age con- 
cerning justice and duty, sin and punishment, 
life and death. 

Because of this fact the world has always 
honored the Bible as inspired, and the more 
carefully we study it the more marvellous that 
inspiration becomes to us and the more capable 
of inspiring us in turn. But in recognizing the 
inspiration of the Bible we must beware that 
we do not convey by that term the impression 
of infallibility or of a uniform degree of inspira- 
tion. The Bible is not a dead level. The day is 
past when we can appeal to it with supersti- 
tious confidence in its infallibility to settle all 
kinds of questions like the old lady who was 
distressed by the problem of whether to dye her 
old dress as spring approached or simply to 
turn it. She opened her Bible at random and 
this verse from Isaiah settled the question for 
her : ' ' Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die f " I 

The Bible is, rather, the record of a growing 
revelation, of a deepening insight into religious 
truths. There are passages in it which are 
only of value to remind us of the pit whence 
we were digged and the rock whence we were 
hewn. Bead over again, for example, the story 
of Jepthah's daughter in Judges. In the heat 
of battle Jepthah vows for the sake of victory 
to sacrifice to Jehovah the first thing which 
comes to greet him on his return home. His 
daughter proves to be the unwitting victim. She 
retires into the mountains for a season to pre- 

[43] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

pare for death and then returns. And the Book 
of Judges says, without pity, without any ex- 
pression of moral indignation, and yet with 
commendable reserve, " And he did unto her ac- 
cording to his vow." Look at it squarely in 
the face! "What is it? Human sacrifice unre- 
proved on the pages of the Bible ! That shows 
the depths out of which the religion of the Bible 
came. If you want to see the heights turn to 
the Prophet Micah and read these great verses 
in the sixth chapter : 

"Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, 
and bow myself before the high God? Shall 
I come before him with burnt-offerings, with 
calves a year old? Will Jehovah be pleased 
with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands 
of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for 
my transgression, the fruit of my body for the 
sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, man, 
what is good; and what doth Jehovah require 
of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, 
and to walk humbly with thy God?" 

But some one says: "If the Bible is not in- 
fallible, if it is not all equally inspired, how 
can I tell what is authoritative and what is 
not?" Fortunately the Bible carries within it- 
self its own standard and touchstone. You can 
take the teachings of Jesus, they form a rule — 
a golden rule — by which you can measure the 
moral elevation of all the rest of the Bible. You 
can do this frankly and freely because Jesus 
himself did it. He had no false notions as to 

[44] 



The Bible 

the infallibility or permanent validity of the 
Old Testament. He did not hesitate to call at- 
tention to things which were written there only 
because of the hardness of men's hearts: 

"Ye have heard that it was said to them of 
old times 'Thou shalt not kill,' but I say unto 
you that every one who is angry with his 
brother shall be in danger of the judgment. Ye 
have heard that it was said 'Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor and hate thy enemy/ but I say 
love thine enemies and pray for them that per- 
secute you." 

There is one last word which I wish to say 
about the Bible — possibly the most important 
word of all. When I was a boy I was taught 
to think of the history of the world as divided 
into two dispensations — one back in Bible 
times, when God was in the world working 
miracles, speaking to men in dreams and vi- 
sions, personally guiding and inspiring them, 
and the other the time in which we lived, when 
God seemed to have gone away and left the 
world to run itself. He was no longer expected 
to work miracles, and if we wished to come into 
communication with him we must read the 
letter which he had written to us and left be- 
hind in the Bible. God's messages no longer 
came to us in living, vital touch upon our souls. 
To know his will we had to travel back across 
the centuries and rely on the experiences which 
other men had had. I no longer feel that way 
about it. I believe there is only one dispen- 

[45] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

sation — that God is just as much in the world 
as he ever was; that there are just as many 
miracles, just as many angels, just as many vi- 
sions as there ever were; that his presence 
broods across the hills beside this western sea 
just as truly as it did at Bethel ; and that great 
figures of our own age like Tennyson and 
Browning, like Tolstoy and Lincoln, like Jane 
Addams and Helen Keller are also among the 
prophets! 

The great thing which the Bible can do for 
our religious life is not to present to us an 
artificially preserved message from God to 
which we can go to learn his will. It is rather 
so to present to us the spectacle of other men 
in other days hearing his voice and finding help 
in his presence that we shall be inspired to 
follow their example and open our lives to the 
indwelling of his spirit. We also are to be 
responsive to his still, small voice and go out 
into our world to find every common bush 
aflame with God. The supreme value of the 
Bible is not merely to find God there, but to 
gain inspiration to find him here. Each age 
must renew for itself something akin to the 
experience recorded in the Bible. 



[46] 



CHAPTER iy 
JESUS 



I 



CHAPTER IV 

JESUS 

REMEMBER reading as a boy a little book 
which told of a preacher who noticed in 
his congregation one Sunday a man of peculiar 
winsomeness and responsiveness, so that he felt 
himself inspired by his presence to change his 
sermon here and there — making it more simple, 
more deeply spiritual. After the congregation 
had gone out he found himself alone with the 
man and lo ! the man was Jesus ! I would speak 
and I would have you listen as though Jesus 
himself sat here listening. I would not enter 
into any controversy about Jesus. I only desire, 
as effectively as I may, to bear witness as to 
what I find in him. 

What I have to say is intensely personal. I 
am a Congregationalist, but this is no authori- 
tative pronouncement of Congregational views, 
for in the nature of the case each Congrega- 
tional minister is independent and can speak 
only for himself. I am a graduate of the Uni- 
versity of California and of Yale Divinity 
School, but what I say is no mere parrot-like 
repetition of the teaching of any school. It is 
rather an attempt to set forth a personal an- 
swer to this question: "What may Jesus moan 
to a man who was reared in a Christian home, 

[49] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

who has spent seven years in study at two 
typical modern universities and who has lived 
eagerly and sympathetically in the full current 
of modern civic life for ten years more ? ' ' 

To begin with, I think it is beyond question 
that the distinguishing characteristic of the 
modern point of view in everything is the use 
of the inductive method. That man is a 
medievalist who starts with a dogma and mar- 
shalls arguments in its support. The dogma 
may be true, the arguments may be valid, but 
the method is medieval. That man is a modern- 
ist who starts with the facts, sits down humbly 
before them and seeks to understand them, and 
is willing to follow where the facts lead, regard- 
less of all dogmas, prejudices or preconceived 
ideas. For men trained in the scientific atmos- 
phere of modern life the most helpful approach 
to Christ will be the approach not by way of 
dogma, but along the line of the inductive 
method. And surely he who said to his disci- 
ples "Come and ye shall see" will welcome our 
approach to him in this spirit of scientific 
humility. 

As I have reconstructed for myself during the 
last seventeen years the meaning of Christ I 
therefore begin here : Whatever else Jesus was 
or was not he was certainly a man. The record 
of the Gospels as I read them reveals to me a 
genuine human being. He lived and felt as a 
man. He "increased in wisdom and stature 
and in favor with God and man." He faced 

[50] 



Jesus 

temptation. He often sat wearied by the well- 
curb of life. He knew defeat and failure. He 
longed for human companionship and he also 
sought for divine companionship in prayer. He 
wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He cried out on 
the cross in anguish of body and of spirit. 

To realize the genuine humanity of Jesus is 
a great gain. As a boy in Sunday school I did 
not get this conception of him. The Christ 
presented to me then was not a man. He was 
only masquerading as a man. In reality he was 
a supernatural being with unlimited knowledge 
and power who was rather thinly disguised in 
garments of humanity. He was really a being 
apart from me or my possible experience. Now 
all this is changed and Jesus has for me a 
greater reality and a higher personal value be- 
cause I believe firmly in the genuineness of his 
humanity. It puts new power into texts like 
"And the word became flesh and dwelt among 
us full of grace and truth" and "being found 
in fashion as a man he humbled himself, becom- 
ing obedient even unto death" and "As the 
Father hath sent me into the world, even so 
send I you. ' ' 

But Jesus was no ordinary man. There are 
certain facts about him which have, it seems to 
me, tremendous significance. First of all is 
this: Not only was he recognized as a great 
teacher in his own day but since his day it has 
developed that he is indeed the supreme teacher 
of humanity in matters of conduct and religion. 

[51] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

His ethical standards have conquered the world 
— not yet in actual attainment, sad to say — but 
as unchallenged expressions of the ideal. Men 
who profess no religious faith, men bitterly op- 
posed to organized religion, yet find in him the 
world's supreme teacher of ethics. 

But you cannot detach the teacher from the 
man himself. Jesus gave to the world not only 
its supreme teaching, but its supreme example 
of the incorporation of the teaching into daily 
life. He lived his message. So far as we can 
see he bears no shadow upon his character. 
There is no stain upon his garments. Nor is 
this purity external only. It seems to be an 
inner fact, for nowhere does he betray con- 
sciousness of sin. He stands as the world's 
sinless, unstained human life. You probably 
remember how Sidney Lanier in his poem ' i The 
Crystal' ' reviews the great figures of history, 
finding in each much inspiration, but also some 
limitation, until at last he comes to Christ, 
when he bursts forth in these great words : 

"But Thee, but Thee, sovereign Seer of time, 
But Thee, poet's Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 
But Thee, man's best Man, love's best Love, 
perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
all man's Comrade, Servant, King and Priest, — 
What 'if or 'yet/ what mole, what flaw, what lapse, 
What least defect or shadow of defect, 
What rumor, tattled by an enemy, 
Or inference loose, what lack of grace 
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's or death's- — 
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ ¥" 
[52] 



Jesus 

No man can contemplate the fact of Christ 
without being struck by the tremendous influ- 
ence which he has wielded in the world. His 
"line is gone out through all the earth." He 
wrote no books ; yet thousands of books owe to 
him their inspiration. He painted no pictures ; 
yet the whole world of painting, sculpture, 
music, even architecture, has been changed by 
him. He held no official position; yet his influ- 
ence has changed and is today changing more 
vitally than ever the whole social order, reprov- 
ing greed and inhumanity and calling men to 
social brotherhood and human service. 

Nor is this influence a mere vague, persua- 
sive, indefinite something — it is very intimate 
and personal. Thousands of men and women 
through the centuries rise up to make confes- 
sion that he has been the dominant power with- 
in their lives — that they are what they are 
because of his presence. Here is something 
deeper than the influence of his teaching or his 
example. It is more like the influence of a 
mother over her son, to use a splendid illustra- 
tion which has only recently come to my atten- 
tion from the paper of a theological student. 
The mother instructs her boy on points of honor 
and morality. She tells him the perils of dis- 
honesty and the tragedy of unchastity. In time 
the boy finds himself away from home in a 
great city. In his poverty and loneliness temp- 
tation comes to him. What is it saves him? His 
mother's sound advice? Not that alone. Her 

[53] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

beautiful and pure life ? Not even that alone. It 
is the feeling of personal love and responsibility 
that he has toward her which makes her advice 
and example dynamic in his life. He does not 
want to be unworthy of her love and trust. It 
has been even so with Christ down through the 
ages. He has been the great redemptive per- 
sonality of the world. Men have been saved, 
not by the cold word of his teaching, not by 
the distant spectacle of his example, but by 
warm personal love and loyalty to him. 

There is a great scene in "The Piper" by 
Josephine Preston Peabody in which the Piper 
argues with "the lonely man," the Christ on the 
cross of the wayside shrine. The Piper pleads 
to be allowed to keep for his very own the chil- 
dren of Hamelin Town, but at last he cannot — 
he surrenders his will to Christ's. Just out- 
side of Trinity Church, Boston, there stands 
a statue of Phillips Brooks — erect, manly, joy- 
ous — preaching with radiant power. But be- 
hind him stands the veiled figure of the Christ, 
who reaches one hand forward, resting it as in 
benediction on the shoulder of the great 
preacher. These things are but typical of hu- 
man experience with Christ. His personal in- 
fluence, his redemptive power, have been simply 
tremendous in the world — and never more so 
than at this very hour. 

One fact more about Christ crowns all that 
goes before. He has become for the world its 
noblest picture of God. How he has illumi- 

[54] 



Jesus 

nated our conception of God! "Who is God?" 
we ask — and we hear his words: "God is a 
Spirit and they that worship him must wor- 
ship in spirit and in truth." "But where is 
God?" we ask. "Here," says Jesus; "here in 
the rain which he causes to fall on the just and 
the unjust; here in the sparrows, not one of 
which falls without his notice; here in the 
lilies of the field, which are clothed by his love 
and wisdom." "But what is God's attitude to- 
ward men?" we ask. And his words are like 
music in our ears as he tells us the parable of 
the Prodigal Son. ' i God is like that, ' ' he says ; 
"God is a loving Father; when ye pray say: 
'Our Father.' " "But we crave for more," 
our hearts cry out, "Show us the Father" — 
and his answer peals forth, ' ' He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father. ' ' 

And, explain it as you will, this has actually 
come to pass. Jesus has become for the world 
its picture of God. "After Jesus it is his reli- 
gion or no religion," says a great German 
scholar. The fact is that the world today thinks 
of God in terms of Jesus Christ. God cannot 
be less than Jesus; he must be like Jesus — 
and more. Our God is an infinite Christ ! 

Behind all this there lies the marvellous self- 
consciousness of Jesus. He had a realization 
of his relationship with God, and the overflow- 
ing power which resulted from it is central in 
his life. Upon the lips of what other character 
in history can you put such words as these: 

[55] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

1 ' I am the light of the world : he that f olloweth 
me shall not walk in darkness," "Come unto me 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will 
give you rest, take my yoke upon you and learn 
of me for I am meek and lowly in heart and 
ye shall find rest unto your souls "! Yet 
these words do not sound immodest or pre- 
sumptuous on the lips of Jesus — they sim- 
ply express the experience of humanity with 
him. 

What shall we say- concerning such a life as 
this? What answer shall we make to such a 
remarkable and cumulative series of facts? 
How shall we classify such a personality? 
What else can we say than that he was divine, 
that in Jesus God revealed himself in terms of 
humanity, that he is the supreme expression in 
human form of the life and character of God? 
"God was in him reconciling the world unto 
himself." "And so the Word became flesh and 
dwelt among us full of grace and truth and we 
behold his glory, glory as of the only begotten 
of the Father." 

But along with this sense of the divinity of 
Christ there goes a great inspiration, a vision 
which may well make us all pause and tremble. 
Divinity is not something apart from humanity 
— the divine life which dwelt in Jesus in all 
its fulness dwells also in you and me. Our lives 
too are a part of the life of God. That electric 
current which in Jesus became incandescent, 
to borrow Winston Churchill's figure, thrills 

[56] 



Jesus 

through us also. He was given to us to show 
us what a divine humanity might be. We are 
to attain "unto the fulness of the stature of 
Christ." He is at last to be "The first born 
among many brethren." What Jesus is hu- 
manity shall at last become ! 

You have noticed, doubtless, that I have said 
nothing about the virgin birth. There is very 
little that needs to be said. It has no bearing 
on my faith in the divinity of Christ. He was 
divine because of his character, his personality 
— not because of the origin of his physical 
body. Did he have two human parents? Did 
he have only one? Settle it for yourselves ac- 
cording to the evidence. It is purely a his- 
torical question and has no bearing on the 
authority of Jesus. You might be able to prove 
beyond possibility of questioning that he was 
born without any human parents at all — and 
yet we would not worship him unless he had 
also been all that he was in his character and 
teaching. You may decide that the evidence for 
the virgin birth is so slender that it is impera- 
tive for you to think of Jesus as born like all 
the rest of us, of two human parents. Per- 
sonally, I should welcome that conclusion, for 
it would only the more definitely make his 
divinity a moral and spiritual thing. It would 
make the fact of the incarnation only more 
genuine and thoroughgoing. It would bring him 
closer to our common humanity in his origin, 
and therefore make the possibility of following 

[57] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

him up the heights all the stronger. But at the 
same time it seems only reasonable to feel that 
so remarkable a life may well have come into 
the world in a remarkable way, and I believe 
that in the annunciation we have an echo of a 
wonderful experience which came to Mary and 
which ought to become the experience of every 
mother — "For lo the Holy Spirit shall come 
upon thee and the power of the Most High shall 
overshadow thee." When we look at things 
with clear eyes we shall see that a birth by two 
parents is just as miraculous — involves the 
presence and power of God just as truly — as 
would a birth by only one human parent. The 
world can easily afford to dispense with the idea 
that Jesus had a physical birth different from 
ours, if in return it can gain potentially for 
every mother the experience of Mary of the 
nearness and presence of God in the great mir- 
acle of bringing a new life and personality into 
the world. 

You have doubtless noticed also that I have 
said nothing about the miracles of Jesus. This 
has been a deliberate omission because I do 
not regard them as primary evidence for his 
divinity. I believe that unusual events, which 
we call miracles, accompanied the life of Jesus. 
Given so remarkable a personality, the miracles 
become only the inevitable overflow of its in- 
fluence in the world. A little boy learns to play 
a violin — becomes proficient enough to play, let 
us say, Handel 's "Largo" with fair accuracy. 

[58] 



Jesus 

The time is correct, the notes are true. We 
compliment the performance. But let a great 
master of the violin appear. Let Kubelik or 
Ysaye play Handel's "Largo." What hap- 
pens? "Tears are in our eyes and in our ears 
the murmur of a thousand years!" We see 
a great river rolling to the sea, we feel anew 
the nobility of life, our experience is one of 
spiritual renewal and we come back to the con- 
cert hall when the last note dies away as those 
who have returned from a far country. Our 
ordinary human lives are like a little boy play- 
ing his violin. The results are very modest and 
limited. But Jesus was a master of life. From 
him no such meager results could possibly be 
expected. The miracles are exactly what we 
should expect. 

But while I believe the miracles of healing, 
I do not base my faith in the divinity of Christ 
upon them. His power to achieve results be- 
yond ordinary human experience does not guar- 
antee his divinity, for if he had worked miracles 
ten times greater than any recorded in the New 
Testament and had not been at the same time 
a good man, we should not build churches in his 
name or worship him today! It is not power 
that commands the allegiance of thoughtful 
men; it is the moral and spiritual principles 
which direct the use of whatever measure of 
power may be given. 

One miracle, however, deserves special men- 
tion — the resurrection. In some way after the 

[50] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

death on Calvary Jesus came back to his dis- 
ciples, who were scattered, discouraged, beaten, 
and convinced them that he was not holden of 
death but was still alive. The accounts of the 
resurrection are not clear nor harmonious. 
Some of them emphasize a reanimation of his 
physical body, yet he did not resume the old 
physical life. Through the stories runs an- 
other tendency which has always appealed to 
me more strongly than the emphasis on his 
physical body — the emphasis on his spiritual 
body — the emphasis on his spiritual presence. 
Mary suddenly finds him with her in the Gar- 
den, the two on the Emmaus road find them- 
selves not alone but walking with him, Paul 
meets him on the desert road leading to Damas- 
cus. This experience with Jesus was the most 
conspicuous element in very early Christian 
preaching. Explain the resurrection how you 
will, the fact remains that the supreme effect 
that Jesus had upon his disciples was to con- 
vince them that he had risen from the dead and 
was alive again f orevermore. 

One important subject, inseparably connected 
with our thought of Christ, has been deliber- 
ately left to the last — the atonement. Why did 
Jesus die upon the cross? Various answers 
have been given at different times in the his- 
tory of the Church. The earliest disciples 
simply pointed to the great fifty-third chapter 
of Isaiah with its picture of the suffering serv- 
ant of Jehovah and said that Jesus died in 

[60] 



Jesus 

fulfillment of prophecy. Later other explana- 
tions arose: that he died to pay humanity's 
debt to God incurred by Adam's sin; that he 
died to satisfy the divine justice by receiving 
on himself the punishment due the sin of the 
world. God, having received payment, having 
exacted justice, was then, men said, in a posi- 
tion to forgive men and reconciliation between 
God and man became possible. 

None of these theories appeals to the modern 
point of view. They are too legalistic. They 
seem to concern a God who is an immense Shy- 
lock or an implacable judge interested in ab- 
stract laws, rather than God the Father of his 
children as revealed by Jesus. What then? 
Shall we take the crosses from off our churches 
and cease to sing 

"In the Cross of Christ I glory- 
Towering o'er the wrecks of time?" 

Not so. Such a sacrifice would be as pathetic as 
it is needless. 

Behind every great doctrine of the past, how- 
ever crudely or even repulsively stated, there 
lurks a great idea — a truth dear and necessary 
to humanity. The atonement is true; it only 
requires a modern interpretation to release 
once more in the world the tremendous power 
which it holds. What is that interpretation? 
Something like this : Jesus' death on the cross 
is not an isolated event; it is rather the sym- 
bolic and supreme expression of the ever-pres- 

[61) 



The Drift Toward Religion 

ent and dominant spirit of his life — of service 
for humanity in a spirit of absolute love and 
self-sacrifice. That spirit came to its final 
dramatic climax in the laying down of his own 
life. That act and all that lies behind it in the 
years of patient self -giving in Galilean villages 
and on the streets of Jerusalem do effect a rec- 
onciliation between man and God. But how? 
By changing the mind of God? Not in the 
least! God's mind did not need to be changed. 
He has always loved and sought his wandering 
children. How then? By changing our mind. 
Jesus died not to make God good but to make 
us good! 

"But," some one asks, "how does the spec- 
tacle of Jesus' life of self-sacrifice culminat- 
ing on Calvary make us good?" Only by 
touching our lives with a divine purpose to live 
in the same spirit of self-sacrifice and join Jesus 
in his search for and service to God's lost chil- 
dren. The world is not to be saved by Jesus 
alone, not by his three hours' agony on the 
cross merely, but by the thousands of men and 
women who themselves become saviors and give 
themselves unselfishly even as did he. This 
young medical student in London is to hear the 
call of the deep-sea fishermen and give his life 
to the people on the coast of Labrador. This 
young woman is to respond to the need of the 
great city, and spend her life in the nineteenth 
ward in Chicago as a friend and helper of the 
foreigner and the forgotten. This young Scotch 

[62] 



Jesus 

weaver is to die on his knees in the little Afri- 
can village, that slavery may cease and brother- 
hood be born. Thousands of nameless and 
humble souls shall in the spirit of the cross 
give themselves not to selfish ends but to un- 
selfish service in cottages and hospitals and 
workshops. And so Christ shall be redupli- 
cated in a myriad of saviors and the world be 
reconciled to the God who is a God of love. Thus 
the atonement — the ' ' at-one-ment ' ' — is continu- 
ally and eternally in process. 

All this ought to make it quite clear to us in 
what essential Christianity consists. It is not a 
matter of theories about the person of Jesus 
nor speculations as to the mystery of the rela- 
tion of his soul to the all-enfolding life of God. 
Speculation is interesting and has its place. 
But a man is not made a Christian by coming 
to any particular intellectual convictions as to 
the nature of Christ. Christianity is rather a 
matter of personal devotion and loyalty to 
Christ and his interpretation of life and duty. 
If only one is sincere in his love for Jesus and 
his desire to reproduce his life in the world, 
we need not fear that such a one will hold un- 
worthy views of his Lord. Continued experi- 
ence with Christ will lead him to profounder 
insight and greater reverence. 

"If Jesus Christ is a man, 
And only a man — I say 
That of all mankind I will cleave to him 
And to him will I cleave alway." 

[03] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

You may begin there! But to love and serve 
and follow Christ will, I believe, inevitably lead 
you on to the second stanza of the poem : 

"If Jesus Christ is a God — 
And the only God — I swear 
I will follow him through heaven and hell 
The Earth, the Sea, and the Air!" 



[64] 



CHAPTER V 
IMMORTALITY 



T 



CHAPTER V 

IMMORTALITY 

HERE are certain difficulties in the 
way of believing in immortality. The 
most obvious one lies in the fact that 
in our experience no one has returned 
from the life after death to tell us about 
it. In this statement I am assuming that, 
in spite of the remarkably interesting data 
collected by the Society for Psychical Research, 
the evidence is still insufficient to prove beyond 
any doubt the reality of spirit communication. 
I believe we should be open-minded on the sub- 
ject, and it is not at all impossible that 
evidence may yet be forthcoming in this de- 
partment of investigation which shall be con- 
clusive. But for the present let us assume what 
is practically true for all of us in our individual 
experience — that no one has come back to us 
from beyond the grave to assure us of his con- 
tinued existence. What then? 

This difficulty does not seem to me so over- 
whelming as it used to be in the days before I 
realized how imperfect is our apparatus of 
senses for perceiving reality and how frag- 
mentary is even our best knowledge of the 
universe. The world is simply full of things 

[67] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

that we have no sense organs to perceive. For 
example : vibrations which come at a given rate 
of speed are interpreted by our eyes in terms 
of light and other vibrations which come at a 
very much lower intensity are interpreted by 
our ears in terms of sound, but it is quite cer- 
tain that there are colors which we cannot see 
simply because our eyes cannot interpret light 
vibrations above or below a certain rate of 
speed, and so also there are sounds which are 
pitched too high or too low for us to hear at 
all simply because our ears are not equipped 
to receive them. This means that our percep- 
tion of the universe is only a fragment of the 
whole. If the total of reality be represented 
by a circle we compass it with our sense organs 
only by a few small arcs here and there on the 
circumference. The fact, therefore, that we 
do not see nor hear our friends after they die 
is not final by any means. There is abundant 
room in the universe for life of a higher and 
more complex character to go on right about 
us all the time without our perceiving it. And 
it is altogether probable that to be set free from 
the limitations of the flesh is of necessity to 
cease from fleshly means of communication. 

There is an illustration from nature which 
throws some light on this point. I once read 
a story of some larvae at the bottom of a pond 
holding a discussion as to why from time to time 
members of their company that had climbed 
up a water-lily stem to the surface of the 

[68] 



Immortality 

pond had never returned. These dwellers at 
the bottom finally made a solemn compact that 
the next one to disappear beyond the surface 
should return to tell his friends all about it. 
Then one of the chief spokesmen began to feel 
an irresistible desire to climb up the water-lily 
stem and, in a few moments, he found himself 
safe and sound on top of the water-lily pad dry- 
ing in the sun. Then a wonderful thing hap- 
pened. He passed through a transformation 
the possibility of which he had never dreamed, 
and before long found himself a dragon-fly 
skimming over the surface of the pond, his 
beautiful gauzy wings iridescent in the sun- 
shine. As he looked down into the dark sur- 
face of the pond it came over him how utterly 
impossible it was that he should ever penetrate 
its depths again and tell the larvae in the mud 
at the bottom how glorious was the life above. 
The second difficulty which has almost 
paralyzed the faith of many men and women in 
immortality is the apparent dependence of 
thought upon the brain. Modern physiological 
psychology has made this dependence very clear 
and evident. It has even localized in the brain 
different departments of mental activity, so 
that by injuring certain convolutions you can 
destroy, for example, the memory for words. 
The memory for faces, for tunes, for locations 
still remains, but the memory for words is gone. 
The materialism of the age from which we are 
just emerging did not hesitate to say that the 

[69] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile 
and the salivary glands secrete saliva. A 
speaker holding this point of view once said to 
a group of people in a room "Give me an axe 
and in a few moments I can put this piano out 
of commission so that no more tunes will ever 
come from it, ' ' and the inference was that with 
equal facility the more delicate instrument of 
the brain could be destroyed and with it the 
music of life. But an answer was given that 
same evening by another speaker who said that 
even though the piano be destroyed the pianist 
yet remained, and there was no reason why he 
might not be given another piano in another 
room and produce even more wonderful music 
than before. 

This is, to my mind, a truer point of view — 
the physical brain is merely the instrument 
upon which the soul plays its music. Surely that 
Wisdom and Power which gave to the soul 
this instrument can be trusted to provide a 
better instrument when this one is no longer re- 
sponsive to the touch. After all, to say that 
the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes 
bile is utterly unscientific, for thought and bile 
are not in the same category. One is the physi- 
cal product of a physical organ and to make 
the parallel hold true the actual physical 
product of brain action would have to be put 
in the fourth place in the equation instead of 
the thought, which is merely a concomitant of 
brain activity. 

[70] 



Immortality 

Let us turn from the negative to the positive 
side of the question and set forth the reasons 
that may impel thoughtful men and women to 
a faith in immortality. 

First of all, I am impressed with the univer- 
sality of this conviction of a continued life after 
death. "Wherever you go around the world, 
even in darkest Africa, you find some kind of 
conception of immortality, and as far back as 
you can go into history, even to the mute testi- 
mony dug up from the graves of prehistoric 
man, you find this same faith in life after 
death. 

The conviction of immortality is like laughter 
— a distinctly human characteristic setting us 
apart from all other beings. It attains to the 
dignity of an instinct. We are coming to realize 
in this day that instincts are not to be despised, 
but that they may be profound witnesses to 
the presence of mighty forces and the working 
of an unseen hand. 

John Fiske in one of his books gives a telling 
illustration of the way in which certain human 
capacities have developed in response to reali- 
ties in the outer world which called them forth. 
There was a time in the evolutionary process 
when life upon this planet was blind, but light 
played upon it and, because there were things to 
see, living creatures developed pigmented 
spots sensitive to light and then imperfect eyes 
and finally the human eye with its capacity to 
see the beauty of the dawn and to trace the 

[71] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

courses of the planets. So, too, there was a time 
when all living forms were deaf, but, because 
later there were sounds to hear, there developed 
in the process of evolution sense organs which 
could interpret sound and music and human 
voices. 

The suggestion seems to me to be a powerful 
one that this world-wide instinct for immor- 
tality, this great craving of the human spirit, 
has not developed aimlessly and foolishly but 
is a response sent forth to a great reality out- 
side which is calling to us so that some day we 
shall not only hear the birds and see the stars 
but shall also perceive the eternal life. 

A second thing which helps me in my faith 
in immortality is the fact of Christ. Not only 
does humanity at large and on the average be- 
lieve in immortality, but the supreme human 
spirit of all the world believed in it too. "When 
Jesus came he incorporated into his teachings 
a clear consciousness of the life eternal: "Lay 
not up treasures on earth," he said; "lay up 
your treasure in heaven where moth and rust 
do not corrupt nor thieves break through and 
steal." "Let not your heart be troubled," he 
said; "in my Father's house are many rooms. 
I go to prepare a place for you." 

And, after they had crucified him, in some 
mysterious way he came back to his disciples 
and convinced them he was still alive. As to 
the method of the resurrection I am entirely in 
the dark, but as to the fact of it I see no ground 

[72] 



Immortality 

for reasonable doubt. Something changed this 
little group of broken-hearted and discouraged 
men; something happened which transformed 
their cowardice and sent them out into the great 
pagan Eoman world conquering and to conquer. 
They said from the very beginning with the ut- 
most emphasis that it was because Jesus was 
not holden of death, but had appeared to 
them and that they knew he was living for- 
evermore. I cannot but believe they were right, 
and all this contributes no small reinforce- 
ment to my faith that 

"Life is ever lord of death 
And Love can never lose its own." 

A third reason for believing in immortality 
grows out of our instinctive and ineradicable 
faith in the moral integrity of the universe. The 
great fact of conscience is a testimony to a con- 
viction as wide as the race that there is a 
difference between right and wrong and that 
fundamentally and ultimately the forces of the 
universe are on the side of right. But, as a 
matter of fact, we do not see right or wrong 
meeting their just deserts in the lives of many 
of the men around about us. We have on one 
hand the spectacle of men seeking their own 
selfish aims, cynically and brutally treading 
into the mire the lives of their fellow beings, 
outraging the most fundamental laws of hon- 
esty and fair play and then living prosperously 
all their lives and dying quietly and pain- 

[73] 



The D rift Toward Religion 

lessly in bed; and we see other men who have 
1 'followed the gleam," who have put their lives 
in harmony with the highest dictates of moral 
integrity, beaten down by disease, by defeat, 
by treachery, in the very prime of their man- 
hood. We see Henry Drummond wasting the 
last years of his life in a losing fight against an 
obscure and painful illness and Robert Louis 
Stevenson banished to Samoa and finally cut 
off in the very prime of his productive power. 
Our faith in the moral integrity of the universe 
seems to demand a day beyond tomorrow. 

As Washington Gladden puts it: "For the 
wrongs that never are righted here, there is 
recompense hereafter : the rogues that go on- 
whipped, the hypocrites that stalk abroad un- 
suspected, the giant oppressors who gather by 
tribute a wealth of continents and build their 
fortunes on the ruins of homes, — for all these 
surely retribution is coming; the mills of the 
Gods grind slowly but no malefactor is done 
with them when man screws down his coffin lid. 
Do not distrust that sense of justice in your 
breast which cries out against the honor and 
power and fame which come to greedy, unscru- 
pulous, cruel men. There is a day after today. ■ p 

I have a feeling that there is a reason for be- 
lieving in immortality in the very incomplete- 
ness of our own lives. "William James has a 
humorous passage in which he sets forth the 
different possibilities which he realizes to be 
latent within his life. How he might have been 

[74] 



Immortality 

many kinds of man, from a soldier or an Arctic 
explorer to a fop and a ' i lady killer, ' ' and has 
ended up by being a gray, dry-as-dust professor. 
We all of us share this experience. Person- 
ally, my earliest ambition was to be a pirate! 
As the disadvantages of piracy as a life-work 
became evident I decided to be a naval officer. 
This in time was given up for civil engineering, 
and behold me now far from all such adventur- 
ous careers — an obscure sky-pilot who only 
now and then from his front windows looks 
longingly out to the great ships as they pass 
through the Golden Gate out to the Pacific. 

Even in the line which we at last choose as 
our own no one of us reaches completion. 
Though we live to be a hundred years old 
our lives are still bafflingly incomplete. You 
have probably heard the story of the old Ger- 
man professor, a philologist, who had spe- 
cialized on the alphabet. He was dying. His 
students gathered around him and said, "Our 
dear Herr Professor, your life has been blame- 
less, one of scholarly rectitude. You have be- 
come the world's greatest authority on the 
alphabet. You surely have no regrets. " And 
the old Professor said, "My young friends, I 
feel that my life has been terribly misspent. I 
have tried to master the alphabet. I have been 
too superficial. If I had life to live over 
again, I would concentrate on the letter A!" 

Why this incompleteness of life? Why does 
it stretch out so lavishly and beckon to us in 

[75] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

every direction we turn? Why are our achieve- 
ments but little fragments of the boundless pos- 
sibilities which we see around us? Personally, 
I believe that this very incompleteness of life 
is God's pledge to us of a continued life where 
we shall go on to do the things that here we 
longed to do and did not, where the dreams 
at last come true. After all 

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp 
Or what's a heaven for?" 

Our faith in immortality receives confirma- 
tion and reinforcement also from the modern 
emphasis upon personality. In the last anal- 
ysis the one thing which we know most 
surely in the world is our own self-conscious 
existence. Descartes, you will remember, 
started out to doubt everything that he could, 
but finally struck bottom with this proposition 
"Dubito, ergo sum" — "I doubt, therefore I 
am." The one thing beneath which he could 
not go was his own personal existence. A book 
like Professor Bowne's essay on "Person- 
alism" is wonderfully strengthening to one's 
faith in immortality and helps to deliver from 
the nightmare of materialism. After all, this 
apparently solid and substantial thing which 
we call matter requires only a change of pres- 
sure or temperature to transform it into liquids, 
gases, heat, light or some other form of energy. 
And when you think the thing through you find 
that we know energy only in relation to per- 

[76] 



Immortality 

sonality. If we believe in the conservation of 
energy, how much more reasonable to believe 
in the conservation of personality. It seems 
to be the noblest and most mysterious form of 
energy. 

Moreover, the nature of the human person- 
ality, as it is being revealed by modern psy- 
chology, brings many hopeful suggestions. We 
have recently been hearing a great deal about 
the subconscious, and have been learning that 
our personalities are vastly larger than the 
cross-section of our waking consciousness at 
any given moment. In this subconscious mind 
are many marvellous things. One of them is a 
well-nigh perfect memory. I once attended a 
class in hypnotism with a group of medical 
men. A young man before being hypnotized 
was asked if he remembered any sermon he had 
ever heard. Being a normal young man, he did 
not! After he was hypnotized the operator 
asked him the same question and he said, "Yes, 
I remember the sermon Bishop Potter preached 
when I was confirmed." "Repeat what you 
remember of it," said the operator. The young 
man stood up, announced the text, and began 
the sermon. I had heard Bishop Potter preach 
myself, and the resemblances in voice and man- 
nerism were so striking that the experience was 
positively uncanny. 

This subconscious mind is also endowed with 
a remarkable perception of natural law, Mosl 
of us have worked on problems until we have 

[77] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

been tired out, have thrown our book in a cor- 
ner, and gone to sleep to wake up the next 
morning and find the whole matter cleared up. 
Many a minister has worked at a sermon, un- 
able to arrange it satisfactorily, only to have an 
entirely new arrangement of the argument, log- 
ical and effective, occur to him after a night's 
sleep. 

Students of hypnotism tell us that not only 
has the subconscious mind a high perception of 
natural law, but it has also a high moral sense 
and often remains more true and sensitive than 
the waking consciousness. We have no more 
than a fragmentary knowledge of telepathy, but 
this marvellous capacity — developed only in ab- 
normal people now — is doubtless also one of the 
functions of the subconscious. In this obscure 
region also lie marvellous reserves of energy 
and a great store of instincts and intuitions. 

All these revelations concerning the marvel- 
lous quality of the personality help us to think 
nobly of the soul and in no wise encourage us to 
believe in its extinction. Many of its capacities 
are entirely latent or put to only the most occa- 
sional and trifling use in this life. Is not the 
argument advanced by Hudson a cogent one — 
that these unused capacities are prophetic of 
some future life where they shall come fully 
into action? 

Dr. Worcester gives a beautiful and striking 
illustration in his book, "The Living Word," in 
which he suggests that, after all, we live three 

[78] 



Immortality 

lives. Let me condense this illustration and 
give it in my own words. The first is a narrow 
and restricted pre-natal life which the child 
lives within the body of its mother. Here in 
this dark world eyes develop, though there is 
nothing to see. Here in the silence ears de- 
velop, though there is nothing to hear. Little 
hands develop, though there is nothing to han- 
dle, and feet for which there are no paths on 
which to walk. Then comes the great day of 
birth and the child emerges out into this won- 
derful world in which we live, where there is 
beauty for the eyes to see and music for the 
ears to hear, where there are deeds of helpful- 
ness for the hands to do, and great roads of 
service on which the feet may go. Once more, 
in this world, great longings are developed 
which are impossible of fulfillment here, "fan- 
cies that break through language and escape,' 9 
marvellous powers and capacities that seem to 
have no adequate use or expression here. What 
then? There comes at last another day of birth 
— which men in their blindness call death — 
when we pass out of this dark and narrow 
world of the flesh into the great freedom of the 
spirit, into that still larger and more untram- 
melled life where all the aspirations and capaci- 
ties which have developed more or loss blindly 
here shall come to their proper use and high 
fulfillment. 

And now, in closing, may I say a few words 
about the judgment, and heaven and hell. The 

[70] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

best way to think about the judgment — it seems 
to me — is to think of it as something automatic 
and continuous. Every day is a judgment day. 
The choices we make, the directions in which we 
send forth our energy, the causes we support, 
the people we love — these things register them- 
selves, moment by moment, in the fabric of our 
lives. When we were little boys we used to hear 
about the Eecording Angel, who sat up in 
heaven writing in a great book the awful deeds 
of naughty little boys. We secretly hoped that 
some of ours would get past him unobserved. 
But how terrible and relentless is the Recording 
Angel of the new psychology — not seated up in 
heaven at a safe distance, but seated in the 
inner citadel of our own lives in the person of 
this marvellous subconscious memory. Well for 
a man if he hangs no pictures upon the wall of 
that memory which he is not willing to have 
look down upon him forever! " Judge not that 
ye be not judged," said Jesus. He did not 
mean by that that we should stop making 
choices or decisions, but he did mean that 
the very judgments we make react upon us 
automatically. 

From this conception of the judgment comes 
a conception of heaven and hell which makes 
these words stand for something less fantastic 
and more impressive. Heaven and hell are not 
places : they are states of mind. A man does 
not have to wait until he dies, and then wake 
up again in the life beyond the grave and pinch 

[80] 



Immortality 

himself and say, " Ah, me, let me look about and 
see whether I am in heaven or hell at last." 
Heaven and hell begin here. There are men 
walking the streets of your city and mine today 
who are in hell, and we have all known men and 
women who in this world had nevertheless al- 
ready claimed their citizenship in heaven. 

It will be a great advance, it seems to me, if 
we can get rid of the idea that death necessarily 
crystallizes our lives — that at that moment they 
become set like a plaster-of-Paris cast, inca- 
pable of future development or alteration. I 
believe there is every reason to trust that the 
world to come is characterized by eternal prog- 
ress and eternal love. Possibly the new penol- 
ogy has something to say about the doctrine of 
eternal punishment. If parents punish children 
only to correct them, if the school principal is 
allowed to punish his pupils only to reform 
them, if the judge of the Juvenile Court is not 
so much concerned to vindicate the law as to 
save and restore the youthful law-breaker, if 
the ultimate goal of all legal punishment is only 
to protect society and the only complete protec- 
tion of society lies in the reformation of the 
criminal, then the great possibility suggests it- 
self that this highest human conception of crime 
and punishment cannot be higher than God's 
and the doctrine of eternal punishment — contin- 
uing forever and achieving nothing — is made 
simply impossible in the face of the now penol- 
ogy. That the hell which begins in this life will 

[81] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

continue in the life to come is altogether prob- 
able, though we must make great allowance for 
the fact that in the life to come we shall be free 
from these physical bodies which are the source 
of so much of our trouble. But if hell continues 
God's love will also continue, and I do not be- 
lieve that that love can be eternally set aside, 
but that somehow, sometime, every soul in the 
far country will come to itself in deep repent- 
ance and return to the Father's house. 

Dr. J. H. "Williams, of Eedlands, used to tell 
this story: A revivalist once came to a Xew 
England town and swept all before him. The 
last night he preached vigorously on hell and 
invited all who wished to go to heaven with him 
to stand up. All arose except the village phi- 
lanthropist, a rather eccentric old gentleman, 
who was unknown to the revivalist. The ex- 
horter pointed his finger at him and said with- 
eringly: "My dear friend, what do you expect 
to do when you go to the other place?" The 
reply, spoken in a quiet drawl, was distinctly 
audible throughout the room. "Well, after 
what you have been saying about it tonight, I 
calculate to start in and try to make a few 
improvements!" 

Let us have faith to believe that there is no 
corner in God's universe where he will not eter- 
nally be trying to make improvements ! 



[82] 



CHAPTER VI 
RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE 



CHAPTER VI 
RELIGION IN DAILY LIFE 

THE darkest problem of life is the mystery 
of evil. If there is a God, and if he is good, 
why does he permit a world to exist with the 
pain and suffering, the sin and sorrow of this 
dark world in which we live? Does it not seem 
sometimes "as if some lesser God had made the 
world" ? Are there not moments in all our lives 
when the terrible spectacle of war, immorality 
and greed, of man's inhumanity to man, the 
cries of pain and anguish, the mute appeals 
from the eyes of those who suffer, call us to re- 
bellion against a world in which such things are 
possible? Do we not cry out with Omar: 

"Ah, Love ! could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then 
Remould it nearer to the Heart's desire!" 

To this dark problem two solutions have been 
proposed which deserve attention. The first is 
the ancient Hebrew solution. It had the merit 
of great simplicity: the suffering and pain 
which come into your life, come as the punish- 
ment for the sins you have committed. If you 
lived a perfectly righteous life none of these 

[85] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

terrible things could happen to you. This was 
the orthodoxy against which the Book of Job 
protested. That great drama of the inner life 
tells the story of Job, a God-fearing, evil-hating 
man upon whom fell terrible calamities in swift 
succession. His friends hasten to advise him 
that all these must be in punishment for some 
hideous secret sin which he has kept from the 
rest of the world. Job protests his innocence 
of any crime worthy of so overwhelming chas- 
tisement and in the great oath of clearing he 
maintains the integrity of his ways before 
God. 

To this protest of the Book of Job Jesus 
added the weight of his teaching when he asked 
the Pharisees of his day if they counted those 
on whom the tower of Siloam fell or the Gali- 
leans whose blood Pilate mingled with the sac- 
rifices as sinners above other men. Yet this 
idea that all suffering is punishment for sin had 
a curious revival at the time of the San Fran- 
cisco earthquake and fire, when I actually heard 
people in the Southern California city where I 
then lived announce that this disaster was a 
judgment on San Francisco for its wickedness ! 
Now it is true, doubtless, that honesty is the 
best policy and that, by and large, the loyalty 
of any man to moral standards makes in the 
direction of comfort and prosperity. It is ulti- 
mately true, of course, that the way of the 
transgressor is hard. But it is no longer toler- 
able for modern men and women to turn the 

[86] 



Religion in Daily Life 

text around and assure everyone who finds the 
way hard before him that he is but receiving 
the just punishment of his transgression. The 
old orthodox Hebrew explanation of the pres- 
ence of pain and sorrow does not meet our 
needs. 

Over against this ancient solution there is a 
new one, fresh and crisp, with the paint still 
gleaming on it. It is the solution presented by 
our Christian Science friends : There is no evil, 
no pain, no disease, no suffering. God is all and 
in all. God cannot know or behold these things. 
Hence they have no real existence; they are 
mere errors of mortal mind. This solution is 
even simpler than the old Hebrew orthodoxy, 
but it has a very painful defect — what you 
drive out at the door comes promptly back in at 
the window. " A rose by any other name would 
smell as sweet, ' ' and if all the evil, pain, disease 
and sorrow in the world are mere errors of 
mortal mind we have only to change the form 
of our original question and it still haunts us 
as before : If God is good and all in all, if pain 
and disease and evil have no real existence, why 
did he not create a world also free from these 
errors of mortal mind? I don't care whether 
you call wife-beating a sin or merely an error 
of mortal mind, the problem of what to do with 
the wife-beater is still before the court. The 
disease that laid low Robert Louis Stevenson 
may be tuberculosis or it may bo merely an 
error of mortal mind, but in either case the 

[87] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

problem is not essentially different — Stevenson 
is gone in the very prime of his powers. 

I confess that I have no completely satisfac- 
tory solution to this dark question, nor have I 
been able to discover one in my reading. But 
there are some considerations which it seems 
to me point in the direction of a solution, and 
there are some practical helps for actually 
meeting the concrete problem in daily life which 
are of comfort and which I can set forth to you. 
There is light enough to travel by, even here. 

Let us take up the problem of moral evil. The 
possibility of doing wrong seems to be abso- 
lutely essential to any rugged or vigorous mo- 
rality. Goodness can only achieve the grandeur 
of moral character when it is not automatic, but 
freely chosen in the face of evil. Of course, as 
John Fiske long ago pointed out, it is easy to 
ask, i ' Just how much evil, then, do you think is 
necessary V 9 But the question can be squarely 
met: "Not a bit of evil is necessary; only the 
possibility of it. ' ' As a matter of fact, I believe 
that evil is not eternal, and that ultimately it 
shall cease to be, not because it is impossible 
but because it is not chosen. 

A capital illustration may be found in the dif- 
ference between a mechanical orchestrion and 
a symphony orchestra. The orchestrion is a 
clever mechanical device. A roll of perforated 
paper is fed over a series of openings commu- 
nicating by means of air pressure with vari- 
ous sets of musical instruments — piano, flute, 

[88] 



Religion in Daily Life 

drums, cymbals, etc. If the record has been 
correctly perforated the tempo of the resulting 
music is mathematically exact; if the instru- 
ments are first correctly tuned the harmony is 
equally perfect. A fine orchestrion is worth lis- 
tening to. In an orchestra the situation is dif- 
ferent. Here you have fifty or sixty different 
players. Each artist has to learn how to tune 
up his instrument, how to play it, how to read 
the score, how to interpret and respond to the 
conductor's signals. The tuning up of an or- 
chestra is an ear-torturing experience. An 
orchestra rehearsal with the violins coming in 
half a beat late, or the trombone four beats too 
soon, is filled with considerable error of mortal 
mind. But in the end, when your orchestra is 
trained, you have music which is flexible and 
expressive, which can interpret shades of mean- 
ing and heights of aspiration forever out of 
range of the orchestrion ; for behind the orches- 
tra are living human spirits responding to the 
interpretative genius of the leader. 

So I believe it is with the world. God might 
have made us all incapable of doing wrong — 
mere pipes in a mechanical orchestrion. But 
God has not made that kind of world. He is 
making a world 'which is more like a groat or- 
chestra, where each one of us must tune his own 
instrument and learn to play the score and re- 
spond to the signals of the Leader. We are in 
the tuning-up period now. But be patient, mas- 
ter your own instrument, learn the score and 

[89] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

gradually the perfect music will emerge, even 
as the Pilgrims 7 Chorus emerges from the Ve- 
nusberg music in Tannhauser. 

From the problem of moral evil let us turn 
now to the pain and suffering, often unde- 
served, often so utterly irreconciliable with the 
way in which we should order the world were 
we in supreme control. Here is a mother bear- 
ing six or eight children, doing heroic service 
in the world, and passing her last years not in 
peaceful enjoyment of work well done but 
racked with disease and pain. Here is a father 
who has tried to be a good father to his chil- 
dren, only to find at last that they do not all 
rise up to call him blessed, but that the son who 
bears his name has dragged it in the dirt, and 
that all the last feeble years of life must be 
spent in unremitting toil to pay his obligations 
and save him from the penitentiary. Here is a 
working man, who wanted to work for an honest 
living, breaking down with disease in an unsani- 
tary factory and seeing his half -grown children 
forced into the mill. If these are the ways of 
God, how can they be justified? 

Probably they cannot be justified with our 
present incomplete knowledge of the entire 
scheme of things and our limited outlook into 
this vast, sounding house of labor. We can only 
trust 

"That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete." 
[90] 



Religion in Daily Life 

But in the meantime here are some considera- 
tions which should not be left out of the ac- 
count: For one thing, we need to guard our 
imaginations. Through the wonderful power 
of the imagination we can gather all the sor- 
rows of the world together and so concentrate 
them upon ourselves that the burden is abso- 
lutely overwhelming. But as a matter of fact, 
the burden is not so concentrated. In our own 
daily life, when we come to think of it, we have 
always found sufficient courage to meet the 
trials that have come to us. Indeed, there seem 
to be latent powers of endurance and resist- 
ance, the depth of which we little dream of until 
some great emergency calls them up. In the 
hour of our darkest trouble we have not really 
desired pity. We have been too busy fighting 
to stop and feel sorry for ourselves. When in 
our imaginations we gather together all the pain 
of the world, we ought to gather together also 
all the world's store of courage, all the latent 
resources with which to meet this pain. It is 
also worth remembering that there are certain 
natural anesthetics which come into play. Be- 
yond certain limits suffering ceases and uncon- 
sciousness begins. It is the power of the 
imagination which makes railroad accidents 
and steamship wrecks seem so terrible. Deaths 
which take place one by one, Buffering which 
goes on all through the city in isolated individ- 
uals — these things do not appal our imagina- 
tions as do a hundred deaths in a wreck or 

[91] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

some other accident. Yet the problem is not 
essentially different. 

There is a consideration of prime impor- 
tance, also, in the effect which suffering, defeat 
and loss may have on character. If we receive 
these things in the right spirit they may ripen 
and mellow our lives. Certainly we turn in 
hours of need not to those who have escaped all 
fires of suffering and trial and have lived a but- 
terfly existence in the world, flitting from one 
pleasure to another, but rather to those who 
have been down into the shadows and who have 
emerged with a new light of sympathy in their 
eyes and with hands quicker unto good. There 
is a vast deal of truth in Stephen Phillip's 
poem, "Marpessa": 

"Yet I, being human, human sorrow miss, 
The half of music, I have heard men say, 
Is to have grieved. 

Out of our sadness have we made this world 

So beautiful; The sea sighs in our brain 

And in our heart that yearning of the moon. 

To all this sorrow was I born, and since 

Out of a human womb I came, I am 

Not eager to forego it ; I would scorn 

To elude the heaviness and take the joy, 

For pain came with the sap, pangs with the bloom." 

Possibly there is some ground for faith that, if 
out of suffering such spiritual fruitage may 
come, suffering itself is not wholly meaningless 
or evil. 

This opens the way for a further considera- 

[92] 



Religion in Daily Life 

tion which must ever be a powerful one with 
Christian men and women — the fact of the suf- 
ferings of Jesus. It means much to us that he 
was "a man of sorrows and acquainted with 
grief. ? ' If we cannot fully unravel the mystery 
of suffering we can at least bear it quietly and 
bravely, as did he. I was much impressed a few 
years ago by reading of the hospital experience 
of a man w T ho was stricken down in a strange 
city, taken to a Roman Catholic hospital and 
operated on. As he came out of the anesthetic 
he saw hanging on the wall at the foot of his 
bed a crucifix. It brought to him this inspira- 
tion, that strengthened him through all the days 
of pain that followed : " He bore his suffering. 
I can bear mine!" If "it behooved Christ to 
suffer these things and to enter into his glory" 
then our faith is not groundless that suffering 
is not the irrational thing it sometimes seems. 

But, after all, the important thing is not to 
explain defeat and suffering, but to meet these 
things — to conquer them and not be gently- 
complaining victims. Whether we like the 
world or not we are in it, and we had better 
make the best of it. You remember Margaret 
Fuller said, "I accept the Universe," and Car- 
lyle commented, "Egad! she'd better!" The 
function of religion is not merely to suggest 
theoretical solutions, but to help men and 
women to meet in a practical and efficient way 
the buffetings of daily life. 

Here are some practical suggestions for the 

[93] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

application of religion to the eveiy-day situa- 
tions and difficulties of our lives. How to live 
above the power of evil and of sorrow may 
be even more important than a philosophical 
explanation. 

First: Believe in God. 

This was the answer that came to Job out of 
the whirlwind: 

"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the 
earth 
When the morning stars sang together, 
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?" 

The world all about you is wonderful beyond 
your finding out, filled with intelligence and 
power. Think of the wisdom that guides the 
stars, that operates in light and snow and ice, 
that teaches the wild oxen their ways and the 
eagle to build her nest. Can you not trust that 
this wisdom which so marvellously permeates 
and guides the universe has not fallen short in 
your daily life f Can you not believe that even 
here, in spite of seeming contradiction, there is 
a Divine "Wisdom which rules and a Love which 
watches over all? Is it probable that your little 
corner of the universe has been overlooked by 
the Supreme Intelligence? Bryant, watching 
a lonely waterfowl sailing south against a gray 
autumn sky, is moved to say : 

"He who from zone to zone 
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone 
"Will lead nrv steps aright." 
[94] 



Religion in Daily Life 

And Browning puts it even more nobly when 
he says : 

"If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
It is but for a time; I press God's lamp 
Close to my breast: its splendor, soon or late, 
Will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day." 

Second: Believe in Yourself. 

Believe in yourself as God's child, as vitally 
related to him, even as the leaves are related to 
the tree or the bay out yonder to the great ocean 
beyond. Believe that your life has not been 
flung meaningless to the void, but that God has 
sent you here for some high purpose. Say to 
yourself with "Whitman : 

"No longer do I seek good fortune — I myself 
am good fortune.' ' 

Believe that whatever happens to you hap- 
pens because it bears you some message you 
need to hear. "Do not pray for easy lives! 
Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for 
tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers 
equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your 
work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a 
miracle. Every day you shall wonder at your- 
self, at the richness of life which has come in 
you by the grace of God." 

Third: Replace Fear by Trust. 

We all know what fear does — it paralyzes 
people both physically and mentally. A fright- 
ened army is an army half conquered. Fear 

[95] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

can upset almost all the functions of the body. 
No person in the grip of fear can have either 
physical health or mental poise and effi- 
ciency. What the great fears do the little fears 
do also in more subtle ways. We know the little 
fears under the name of worry. Worry im- 
pedes all the processes of digestion. It reduces 
the size of the capillary arteries and impedes 
the circulation of the blood and consequently 
the removal of waste tissue from the body. A 
prominent physician said to me: "When a man 
comes into my office complaining that his stom- 
ach is all upset and he can't digest his food, I 
make him sit down in that chair and I look him 
square in the eye and say: 'See here, you are 
worrying about something. The first thing to 
do is to stop that worry. ' ' ' 

If we could replace fear and worry by a trust- 
ful attitude of mind we should remove a large 
part of the suffering in the world and prepare 
ourselves to meet with double courage and effi- 
ciency whatever might yet remain. But how? 
By the practical application of religion to life. 
Here is a method worth trying. I don't know 
altogether where it came from — it grew. But 
I know it will work. Every night as you go to 
sleep make it a practice to relax all your mus- 
cles and then quietly and peacefully repeat to 
yourself some such little formula as this : "I am 
God's child. He loves me. Underneath are the 
everlasting arms and round about me is his 
great love. As the day is even so shall my 

[96] 



Religion in Daily Life 

strength be. There is nothing in all the world 
of which I need to be afraid. Because I am 
God's child these are the words that are going 
to govern my life ; bravely, quietly, calmly, pa- 
tiently, lovingly, trustfully and with perfect 
serenity and self -control. ' ' 

Fourth: Replace Hatred by Love. 

The physiological and mental effects of ha- 
tred are akin to those of fear. "Green-eyed 
jealousy" is not mere poetry — it represents the 
ultimate physiological effect of hatred and jeal- 
ousy. Hatred will draw ugly lines on your face 
and on your soul. If we could eliminate from 
the world hatred, the holding of grudges, the 
spirit of revenge, how much of the world's bur- 
den of sorrow would be lifted! You can put 
away your share. "I have never willingly 
planted a thorn in any man's bosom," said Lin- 
coln. Make that the standard of your attitude 
toward men and then go further and say, 
"Neither have I permitted any man to plant a 
thorn in my bosom." 

Fifth: Work! 

Work because you at least want to pull your 
own weight in the world, but, deeper than that, 
work because work is one of the world's great- 
est sacraments. Many a man borne down witli 
his own sorrows or oppressed with the burdens 
of the world has turned with a kind of blind 
instinct to bury himself in his work. And as he 
worked dumbly in the darkness there came 

[97] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

gradually light and comfort and understanding. 
Why? Because work is sacramental and 
through it we enter into living fellowship with 
the Father who "worketh even until now!" 

Sixth: Resolutely Cultivate Good Cheer. 

Count it a deep disgrace to be grouchy and 
resolve to consume your own smoke and show a 
shining, happy face to the world. 

"A naked house, a naked moor, 
A shivering pool before the door; 
A garden bare of flowers and fruit 
And poplars at the garden foot; 
Such is the house that I live in 
Bleak without and bare within." 

Your house of life may be no more attractive 
than that at first glance. 

"Yet shall your ragged moor receive 
The incomparable pomp of eve, 
And the cold glories of the dawn 
Behind your shivering trees be drawn; 
And when the wind from place to place 
Doth the unmoored cloud galleons chase, 
Your garden gloom and gleam again 
With leaping sun and glancing rain; 
Here shall the wizard moon ascend 
The heavens in the crimson end 
Of day's declining splendor; here 
The army of the stars appear!" 

Good cheer is largely a matter of will-power, of 
conquering our moods, of resolutely treading 
down self-pity and cleaving ever to the sunnier 

[98] 



Religion in Daily Life 

side of doubt. You doubtless remember Alice 
Freeman Palmer's experience with the little 
tenement children in the Boston vacation school. 
"Tell us," they cried — these children of the 
tenements — "tell us how to be happy !" And 
the answer was filled with wisdom : ' ' See some- 
thing beautiful every day; learn something 
beautiful every day; help somebody every 
day. ' ' Eead the story and you will see that the 
prescription worked well in the Boston tene- 
ments. It will work in other places equally well ! 
Suppose one orders his life according to 
these spiritual ideals — what will happen! I 
cannot guarantee that pain and suffering will 
cease for you, nor that if you are exposed to 
smallpox or yellow fever or typhoid you may 
not have to battle with disease; nor that dis- 
aster may not come to your business ; nor that 
death may not step within the circle of those 
who are near and dear to you. No one can 
guarantee these things. Those who pretend to 
do so simply delude themselves. But this can 
be guaranteed without equivocation: If any 
man will order his life according to these high 
spiritual principles he shall not be left a help- 
less victim before whatever trial may beat upon 
him. He shall have in these ideals, and in all 
they have contributed to his life as he has stead- 
fastly held to them, a refuge, a source of 
strength in the hour of need, an equipment of 
weapons with which to fight a good fight in the 
day of battle. 

[99] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

After all, the test of life is old age. There 
are men who as they grow old grow hard, dis- 
illusioned, embittered, rebellious. The things 
to which they have given their energies have 
gone with youth and old age is empty and 
lonely. But to any man or woman who cher- 
ishes these spiritual ideals old age shall be not 
something to be dreaded, but something to be 
welcomed serenely. To grow old with these 
ideals is to mellow, to find life ever more inter- 
esting, to face death with 

" ... in my heart 
Some late lark singing — 
The sundown splendid and serene." 

Those on the Atlantic Coast who looked into the 
face of Edward Everett Hale and those on the 
Pacific Coast who loved John Knox McLean 
know how serene the faces and how beautiful 
the wisdom of old men may be. 



[100] 



CHAPTEE VII 
THE CHURCH 



J 



CHAPTER VII 
THE CHURCH 

ESUS said very little about the Church but 
a great deal about the Kingdom of God. 
He was more interested in establishing the 
rulership of God in the lives of men than in set- 
ting forth any husks of organization. He wrote 
no creed, established no ritual, ordained no 
bishops. He left his followers free to organize 
as might prove wise in each day and generation 
to hasten the coming of the Kingdom. The 
Church of each age must be judged by its effi- 
ciency in getting done in the world the things 
Jesus sought to accomplish. 

But to understand the Church of today and to 
be delivered from taking certain ecclesiastical 
pretensions too seriously we need to know 
something of its history. The Christian Church 
began with the immediate followers of Jesus 
who considered themselves regular members of 
the Jewish Church, but believed that they were 
especially enlightened by their conviction that 
the Messiah had come. These first Christians 
had no intention of separating from Judaism — 
they were simply good Jews drawn together by 
common loyalty to Christ. They looked to his 
inner group of the twelve for leadership, and 

[103] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

they appointed seven other men to serve tables 
and to distribute alms to the poor of their num- 
ber — who were by no means few. They gave 
generously to the common funds, some contrib- 
uting all they possessed, though this was not 
compulsory. 

But as Christianity overflowed Judaism into 
the Graeco-Roman world and churches com- 
posed largely of Gentiles sprang up in the track 
of St. Paul and other missionaries the Church 
took on slightly more elaborate forms of organ- 
ization. Local officers seem to have been the 
"episkopos" or "bishop," a Greek term mean- 
ing overseer and practically corresponding in 
secular organizations of that day to our term 
president, and the " presbuteroi," or elders, 
whose offices were probably derived from the 
organization of the synagogue. Besides these 
there were deacons to look after the poor, and 
apostles, teachers, and prophets — many of them 
practically itinerant evangelists. The early 
churches seem to have been self-governing and 
were composed largely of slaves. It must be 
remembered that almost all school teachers and 
even physicians of the period were slaves. Slav- 
ery implied social misfortune, but not neces- 
sarily ignorance. The meetings of these early 
churches were held at night and at private 
houses — hence the Pauline salutation, "to the 
church in thy house" — and the services were 
exceedingly simple. They included a sort of 
basket lunch called the love-feast, Scripture 

[104] 



The Church 

reading, prayer, singing of psalms and testi- 
monies. Then the inquirers and all not defi- 
nitely committed to Christianity were sent out 
(Latin, "missa," whence our word "mass" for 
the Roman Catholic eucharist) and the group 
of Christian believers remaining ate the sym- 
bolic Lord's Supper together. 

In 313 Christianity became a tolerated reli- 
gion and in 325 Constantine proclaimed it the 
official religion of the Empire. From now on 
the simplicity of the earlier days was gone. 
Vast masses of people became Christians by 
wholesale — hardly more than baptized pagans. 
The Christian leaders also found themselves 
with the whole machinery of organized pagan- 
ism turned over to them. At the same time 
Constantine transferred his capital to Constan- 
tinople and left the bishop of Rome as the most 
influential person in the West. Then grew up 
feudalism with its ideal of a dual organization 
of mankind — a Holy Roman Empire with the 
emperor at its head and a Holy Roman Church 
with the pope at its head. The Medieval Church 
was the result of these events and forces. The 
cup was denied the laity, the power and impor- 
tance of the priesthood increased, the monastic 
orders grew apace, the saints took the places of 
the local gods and goddesses dear to the com- 
mon people, Christmas and Easter were substi- 
tuted for old pagan festivals, the bishop of 
Rome became pontifex maximus and it looked 
as if Christianity had conquered the Roman 

[105] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

Empire. TTe now realize that it was more 
nearly true that the Roman Empire had con- 
quered Christianity! 

Yet this great Medieval Catholic Church, half 
pagan as it was, had its own share of beauty 
and spiritual power. The great Gothic cathe- 
drals still stand as witnesses of a religious life, 
the secret depths of which we imperfectly un- 
derstand as out of the noise of the modern 
street we step beneath their great arches or 
gaze reverently down their dim and silent 
aisles. And St. Francis of Assisi, whose life 
had so little to do with cathedrals but who lived 
out of doors along the roadside with the birds 
and the flowers, the lepers and beggars, the 
Wolf of Gubbio and Brother Sun and Sister 
Water — this little poor man of Assisi, poet, 
philanthropist, mystic that he was — makes it 
impossible for us to count even the Middle Ages 
utterly "dark." 

After the Middle Ages came the Renaissance 
— that great awakening of the human spirit in 
all departments of life. It expressed itself first 
in literature, architecture and art, and later in 
religion. Wyclif, Huss and Savonarola were 
silenced, but Luther at last set Europe aflame 
with a fire that could not be quenched. The 
Reformation was a protest against the veneer 
of Roman paganism and the dogmas of medie- 
val scholasticism, and a rediscovery and re- 
newal of loyalty to the simpler Christianity 
that had existed before the days of Constantine. 

[106] 



The Church 

The Reformation was not uniform — indeed it 
shows two distinct types and many variations. 
One type was rather conservative. It parted 
with no more of medieval forms than was abso- 
lutely necessary. It is exemplified by the Lu- 
theran and Episcopal Churches which, while 
vigorously Protestant in their theology, while 
turning the service from Latin into the common 
tongue and banishing celibacy and the confes- 
sional, yet retained the cross and vestments and 
titles, the frescoed saints and stained glass win- 
dows, the church year and the candles on the 
altar. The sterner and more radical type was 
led by Calvin — in its most extreme form by the 
Anabaptists — and refused to countenance any- 
thing that might bring back memories of Rome. 
The vestments were replaced by the ordinary 
scholar's gown of the educated gentleman, the 
frescoes were whitewashed, the stained glass 
windows broken, Christmas and Easter ban- 
ished, bishops and priests expelled, and not only 
were the candles taken off the altars but the 
altars themselves were pulled away from the 
walls and transformed into communion tables, 
behind which stood the ministers, facing the 
people. The old whitewashed churches of Hol- 
land bear striking witness to the rigor of this 
type in the Reformation. 

Now out of this Reformation movement come 
the various Protestant denominations of today. 
The Episcopalians and Lutherans descend his- 
torically from the more conservative wing of 

[107] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

the Reformation party. The Calvinistic wing 
expresses itself in the Reformed Church in Hol- 
land and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland 
and in the extreme Puritan party in England. 
Out of this last have come the Baptists, the 
English Congregationalists, and by way of Ley- 
den, the " Mayflower " and Plymouth Rock, the 
American Congregationalists. From these pri- 
mary denominations secondary ones have 
arisen — the Methodist as the result of a great 
movement for religious quickening in the 
Church of England led by the Wesleys, the 
Unitarian as a protest against the neo-Calvin- 
istic theology of New England Congregation- 
alists, the Disciples or Christians out of the 
Baptist and Presbyterian Churches of the Mid- 
dle West, and finally the Christian Scientists 

out of Boston! 

Possibly it has been worth while wading 
through all this historical outline in order to 
realize why things are as they are today, to 
understand how utterly anachronistic is the sur- 
vival of some of our denominational differences, 
and to be set free now to face the practical 
problems which confront not some little denom- 
ination but the great Church Universal. "What 
to us are vestments or candles or stained glass 
windows or prayer-books or the question of ob- 
serving Lent or Easter? In all these things 
we are perfectly willing to give every man — or 
church — utmost freedom to follow the way that 
may best minister to his spiritual life. Congre- 

[108] 



The Church 

gationalists are keeping Lent and, out in Africa 
at least, Episcopalians admit non-conformists 
to communion. The Baptists have practically 
given up close communion and most Presbyte- 
rian Churches are equipped with organs ! My 
own pulpit is on one side of the church instead 
of in the middle and I frequently use the 
prayer-book prayers in the service. These 
things are no longer of sufficient importance to 
divide the Church of Christ as it faces its really 
great task in the world ! 

What is the task of the modern Church? To 
serve the moral and spiritual needs of the 
world, to do the great thing that was ever 
nearest to the heart of Jesus — build here in the 
earth the Kingdom of Heaven. The Church 
should stand in the crowded ways of modern 
life as one that serves. It should be a great 
public servant in matters of morality and 
religion. 

In order that we may really face our own day 
and get as far as possible from the terminology 
of the Middle Ages, let me suggest to you this 
parable: The Church is a great public service 
corporation. It is strikingly like a public serv- 
ice corporation in three ways: First of all, it 
supplies great common necessities which every 
man must have. The Church is a purveyor of 
the water of life. It seeks to bring light into 
the darkness of ignorance. It dispenses power 
to those whose moral machinery has stopped ; 
it seeks to put men in communication with one 

[109] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

another as brothers and with God as loyal chil- 
dren. Its transportation service is tremendous 
in bringing men up to the level of high ideals, 
and its educational work is called for wherever 
children are being trained for life. 

The Church and the public service corpora- 
tion are also bound by one common and inexo- 
rable law: that, in the case of either, competi- 
tion is almost criminally wasteful. Students of 
social problems now uniformly recognize that 
it is an economic waste to have two telephone 
companies, two electric light companies, two 
street car systems competing against one an- 
other. The public pays for the duplication of 
equipment and overhead expense. As one looks 
at the church life of a typical city how utterly 
foolish seem the location of the Protestant 
churches, the failure to establish any real par- 
ishes for which the churches shall be definitely 
responsible and the compelling of poor neigh- 
borhoods to be religiously starved while rich 
neighborhoods are religiously overfed. 

Again, the Church and the public service cor- 
poration have this in common : their continued 
existence depends absolutely on the efficiency 
of the service they render. Wise public service 
corporations realize this and so seek publicity 
and maximum efficiency. They know that they 
can put off the day of government ownership 
only as they do the work in their field more 
cheaply and effectively than the government 
can. Since the advent of the parcel post the 

[110] 



The Church 

express companies have seen a great light. The 
Church has a similar lesson to learn. It must 
win the respect and loyalty of men, not by living 
on its past reputation but by demonstrating its 
power to render service today and tomorrow. 
The world is not going to be interested in 
theories of apostolic succession. As Winston 
Churchill says : ' ' The successors to the apostles 
are apostles. " The church that meets the twen- 
tieth century as eagerly and hopefully as the 
apostles met the first century is in the real suc- 
cession. The world cares very little that this 
Church came over in the "Mayflower" — it is 
more interested in what it can do for those 
that are now coming over in the "Vaterland," 
the "Olympic," the "Mongolia" and the 
"Chiyo Maru." 

Here are four tests which modern life uncon- 
sciously but relentlessly requires of the Church 
today : 

(1) Is it sincerely seeking effective church 
unity? How to unite the Christian forces of 
America and organize them for their common 
task is one of the supremely important issues 
of today. Denominations which think they 
have a monopoly of religion, so that no commu- 
nity is complete without them, must give way to 
a respect for the value and dignity of all Chris- 
tian churches and must show a spirit of humil- 
ity rather than arrogance. We must have an 
effective working unity of all Christians of 
whatever name before we can face the problems 

[111] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

of present-day city life — and the need in the 
country is, if possible, even more urgent. 

How shall effective church unity come? 
First of all, not by absorption. We shall not all 
become Episcopalians or Baptists or even Con- 
gregationalists. That is the ideal of Christian 
unity denominations sometimes seem to hold — 
we are all to accept their standards. They take 
the attitude of the tiger in the jingle : 

"There was a young lady of Niger 
Who went for a ride on a tiger; 

They returned from the ride with the lady inside — 
And a smile on the face of the tiger!" 

But church unity is not coming that way ! 

Then there are others who seem to think that 
church unity may be achieved by what might be 
called the method of the least common denomi- 
nator. The Episcopalian shall give up his 
prayer book, the Baptist his immersion, the 
Methodist his presiding elder, and at last we 
shall get down to the elements common to all 
denominations. 

But these denominational peculiarities are 
largely temperamental and have certain real 
values. Abolish them and they would begin to 
grow up again next week. In New Haven, 
where Congregationalism is overwhelmingly in 
the majority, the local Congregational churches 
differ among themselves very much as the dif- 
ferent denominations do in Western cities. 

If not by absorption and if not by the method 

[112] 



The Church 

of the least common denominator, how then 
shall a working Christian unity be achieved? 
The answer of history seems tolerably clear — 
by federation. How was our American nation 
formed out of the group of jealous, highly self- 
conscious colonies along the Atlantic seaboard 
one hundred and fifty years ago? Not by ab- 
sorption — Virginia did not swallow up Connect- 
icut. Not by elimination of all points of 
difference — Massachusetts did not make many 
concessions to the slacker standards of New 
York or Delaware. An effective union came by 
federation in face of a common peril and to ac- 
complish a common task. Each colony retained 
local self-government, retained its customs and 
prejudices, but each gradually learned to add 
to these things a new element of loyalty to the 
larger thing which became at last the nation. 
for some great-hearted George Washington 
to summon our provincial religious denomina- 
tions to rise out of their suicidal local jealousies 
to meet the great task of Christendom ! 

(2) Is it reaching youth? Here is this great 
stream of childhood with its never-dying splen- 
dor and its never-ending song still pouring in 
through the gates of birth. What is the Church 
doing to bring to every child in the world, as 
its life expands, the great seed-thoughts of 
Christian truth ? How efficient are our Sunday 
schools and other means of Christian educa- 
tion? How efficient are they in our big strong 
churches? How efficient in our little struggling 

[113] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

churches? How efficient in the tenement dis- 
tricts of our cities, where the streets swarm 
with little children? It is more important to 
meet this test than to be absolutely sure you 
have been baptized in the only possibly correct 
fashion. A parish house where the ten com- 
mandments are taught on Sunday and where 
during the week this same moral code is put 
into operation in clean athletics, wholesome rec- 
reation and good-fellowship; a social-center 
building open every day and night, dedicated to 
character building and providing for the youth 
of the community a better rendezvous than the 
saloon; even a basketball court on a vacant lot 
supervised for the welfare of the young life of 
the neighborhood — such activities as these very 
properly go far to endear the Church to the gen- 
eration in the midst of which it must do its 
work. 

(3) Is it delivering a social message? "We 
are living in an era of social reconstruction. 
The culmination of a great mechanical era is 
symbolized in the completion of the Panama 
Canal. The engineering of the future is going 
to be social engineering. Something like the 
same brains, energy and money that have been 
poured into the solving of physical problems 
are now to be turned toward our social prob- 
lems. We are building something more beau- 
tiful than any slender Gothic spire that ever 
lifted itself against the sky — we are building a 
better civilization of brotherly men. The emer- 

[114] 



The Church 

gence of the juvenile court, the Pittsburgh Sur- 
vey, the Lloyd George budget, the modern 
drama, such a magazine as the " Survey," the 
growth of Socialism — all point to the awakened 
social conscience of our day. 

For this day of social reconstruction the 
Church has a message. It is no new-fangled 
message hurriedly improvised for the occasion, 
but a message deeply rooted in the past, even 
as far back as the days when Moses argued with 
Pharaoh concerning hours of labor, wages and 
industrial conditions on the banks of the Nile ; a 
message inevitable from the great teachings of 
Jesus concerning the sacredness of childhood, 
the dignity of womanhood, the supreme value 
of every human soul. Whatever else Jesus 
taught or did not teach, he certainly taught 
brotherhood, not as a beautiful sentiment but as 
a social responsibility. That every child should 
have a chance physically and spiritually to 
grow up into a well-rounded manhood or wom- 
anhood, that every man should have his just 
share of the product of his toil, that no woman 
should be forced into any form of slavery, that 
reform, not vengeance, should rule our prisons, 
that arbitration and justice rather than brute 
force and war should rule in international rela- 
tions — these things constitute the social mes- 
sage of Christianity and they root deep into the 
very center of it. If the Church is adequately 
to serve the twentieth century, it must deliver 
this social message. It must deliver it from 

[115] 



The Drift Toward Religion 

its pulpit at the morning service as of equal 
dignity with the individual message it has 
stressed so long. And it must incarnate its 
message in practical service to the community 
by so building its edifices that they shall not 
stand cold, aloof and silent all the week, but so 
that every day and every night they shall stand 
open, radiant with light and vibrant with broth- 
erhood and all appropriate forms of social serv- 
ice. It does this on the foreign field already — 
why not at home? 

(4) Can the Church transfigure the lives of 
men? The world cannot be saved by any merely 
social regeneration, though that is part of the 
whole. The supreme task of the Church is not 
accomplished until it has brought the individual 
soul face to face with God. The world is glad 
Jesus was a carpenter, but at its deepest mo- 
ments that fact merges into the greater fact 
that he was the Son of God. It is because 
through Jesus we come not merely to brother- 
hood but also to God that we cleave to him. The 
parable of the Good Samaritan does not stand 
alone — the tenderer story of the Prodigal Son 
must ever be bound in the same volume. 

"Oft have I seen at some cathedral door 
A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat, 
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet 

Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor 

Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er; 
Far off the noises of the world retreat; 
The loud vociferations of the street 

Become an undistinguishable roar. 

[116] 



The Church 

"So, as I enter here from day to day, 

And leave my burden at this minster gate, 

Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray, 
The tumult of the time disconsolate 

To inarticulate murmurs dies away, 

While the eternal ages watch and wait." 

This is the last test — can the Church bring 
men into the very presence of God so that his 
strength may flow through their weakness and 
round their restlessness his rest? 

The church that can meet these four tests 
shall endure and be loved and honored in the 
world, whatever name it bears and whatever 
liturgy it follows. 



[117] 



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